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Why I Don’t Like Video - My Brain is a Mini-Google, Yours is Too

I finally figured out why I don’t like any serious application on online video, vlogging, etc., and why I think I’ve only watched one of Scoble’s video interviews since he went to the video side from MS. I always found it a bit recidivistic - to want to emulate TV on the net, but never took the time to figure out why - until now.

Its one part learning theory, one part reading mechanics, and one part personal preference. What prompted this thinking was the Gabe Riviera (TechMeme guy) Interview by 1938 Media. I’m sure its full of interesting, useful insights - but what has prevented me from watching it is the fact that I’m busy like crazy, and video is just unparseable.

Here’s the mini-Google theory: A text blog post I can skim and pick out the parts that are interesting to me for a more detailed read - essentially my brain functions as a mini-Google, crawling the post, getting a superficial understanding of its contents, assigning a PageRank to each paragraph and subsection, identifying relationships between them, and flagging certain parts (or the whole thing) for further review.

With video and voice, this is impossible: there’s no way to crawl at high speed, get the gestalt, and the dive deeper - its an all or nothing, real-time proposition that to me makes sponging and organizaing massive amounts of information (the joy of the internet!) slow and cumbersome. So I don’t bother.

At the end of the day, I’m guessing I might be at the extreme end of the spectrum of skimmer vs. detailed reader, but for better or for worse, that’s how I am. What about you?

Tagging and ratings might add an element of filtering, but before video is any use to me, I really want a transcription-based indexing search engine that break up a 20 minute PodTech video into Q&A subsections indexed by keyword, viewable individually. Does this exist already? I’m not sure - I seem to recall some buzz around video markup and timeline chopping sites a while back - a topic for further research.

In the meantime, the secrets of Gabe’s success will remain unavailable to me, locked in the ultra-low-bandwidth, forced agenda, passive medium of video.

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