3 Things That Make Video a Blog

Today I had the chance to talk with some church staff guys about web 2.0 strategy...specifically online video and blogging (and the resulting combination of the two...video blogging). This church already spends significant effort on video work and weekly communications to their church members and community. Many churches these days are spending more time with video production but might not be thinking through making the most use of their efforts. The guys I spoke to today now realize that with a little more planning and about ten more minutes of video shooting each week they've got all the pieces for a video blog for extended outreach. I informed them about three things they'll need to make sure are included to make it a full fledged blog:

• RSS feed to let people subscribe to the video blog
• Permanent link so it can be referred to by itself and referenced directly in the future
• Comments to get feedback from viewers

I recommended they set up a free blog on Blogger or Wordpress (both of which automatically give you the above components) and load their video to Vimeo as it's done. The code provided Vimeo can be quickly loaded into either blog tool and they have an instant video blog!

Get Your 15 Megs of Fame

We know there are a ton of video sites now. You can find a sizable list of them at Catagoriz (scroll down and look for the "video" section). With all this free video hosting available what is to be made of the infamous "15 minutes of fame?" Does a reference on a video blog count? What if you just upload some video to YouTube or Vimeo? Does that count?

The original 15 minutes of fame came about when the opportunities to be seen far and wide via video were controlled by the television stations. But somewhere between Candid Camera and America's Funniest Home Videos this started to deteriorate. Now it's all but dead. Today we don't need TV for this...just ask the dance guy or the urban ninja.

If, in fact, the 15 minutes of fame are now dead does that mean we've entered the era of 15 megs of fame? For 15 megs you can get a video on any number of video hosting websites. If it's compelling enough, funny enough, weird enough, or some kind of "enough" we don't even know about yet...it will make the rounds of emails and conversations and could in time reach well into the millions of views.

For any organization that can harness the power of the 15 megs of fame, they'll have something truly valuable. The problem with the 15 minutes of fame was that it only lasted about that long. With the 15 megs of fame, however, it can continue to grow and gain online momentum over time. Whereas time was the enemy with the 15 minutes, time is your friend with the 15 megs. If it's true that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame you can have mine. I'll take the 15 megs.

By the way, the winner from yesterday's free Starbucks offer was.....Chris from Voxacious. Congrats Chris! Just let me know when and where.

Vimeo Makes Video Integration on Blogs a Snap

A friend asked me today to recommend a video hosting website to him to use for a family blog he keeps. The first one I suggested was Vimeo.com because I've heard some good things about it. He reported that it was easy to load the video onto Vimeo but wasn't sure how to get the video onto his Blogger blog. Vimeo provided him with a video embed link and he sent it to me to get onto his blog. At first I wasn't sure how difficult this was going to be because I had a terrible time getting a You Tube video to work for me a few months ago. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the link Vimeo provided just had to be plugged into Blogger's new post field and it published to the blog without a hitch or glitch. I spent at least 30 minutes the day I tried to get You Tube video on this blog so the 30 seconds it took to get the Vimeo video on my friend's site today was a breeze. I know where I'll go when I have a choice for video from now on. Also, if I ever start a video blog, Vimeo will be my first option to host the video...it was just that easy!