Online Media Cultist

I titled this piece very deliberately in response to Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb’s Video Comments? No Thanks – 5 Reasons They Don’t Work.

Now, I’m not a maniac fan of video comments; they don’t turn me on tremendously on a personal level. Also, not that many people have webcams so they’re not going to hit massive scale anytime soon.

That said, they add a really nice wrinkle and option in the way that people can interact with a blog or website (for a bunch of examples, check out TechCrunch, which rolled out video comments through its partnership with Seesmic yesterday). Think about it: if someone’s going to take the time to turn on a webcam and say something in front of it that the whole world might have the potential to contemplate, isn’t that a pretty cool thing? And when we’re talking tech and media-related blogs, I think in the vast majority of cases people who leave video comments are going to at least try to be thoughtful and intelligent about it.

Below are the reasons that Catone feels that video comments don’t work, and my responses.

* You can’t scan them - Josh says that video comments take longer to watch than video comments take to view. But for people who don’t want to watch them, it’s effortless to skip them. Further, I’d argue that video thumbnails always give a page some visual flavor and help to break up dry-looking text. Finally, it will be rare for any site to get a huge number of video comments on any given story, so for the present they are more garnish than main dish anyway.

* Harder to moderate - As I mention above, it will be rare for any site to get a lot of video comments, so the time to watch and moderate them likely won’t be excessive. And there are always going to be spammers, flamers, and trolls on any popular site, so whether they exist in print or video they’ll need to be dealt with. And I imagine that people who flame via video will end up looking pretty hilarious in many cases!

* They’re inaccessible - I’m confused about what the point is here. Perhaps that video comments will be difficult to access for handicapped people? “In order to make video accessible, you need to add captioning — which is probably not something you’ll see on Seesmic anytime,” Catone writes.

* You can’t leave links - If a publisher wants to, it’s easy enough to attach a unique URL to every comment, thus providing a unique URL (if not embed code) for every comment on a site, including videos. I get what Catone is saying, that a wonderful thing about comments is the ability to link out to related content, but a workaround here of course is to let people leave a text description sit with their video comment, in which you can write something like: I blather on insanely about my obsession with Twitter on this video. Check out Twitter at Twitter.com, y’all! Or some such.

* They increase load time - They don’t though. A well developed video comment system will simply load a little Flash and a thumbnail image, so that it’s not that much heavier than publishing a small .gif to the page. Catone mentions that using a service like Seesmic will make the load of the video comment a third-party call, but think about how most blogs are jammed to the gills with widgets and ads. Those are all third-party calls too!

I actually think that a big time video blogging platform will emerge over the next year or two. Viddler is one of the closest plays I’ve seen in this direction, a video and social networking site that is stronger than YouTube in terms of creating a home for videobloggers to promote themselves.

Video content and video feedback from the community will become an increasingly essential part of dialogue on the web. So in my view we might as well embrace the video commenting beast.