The TrueTalk Blog

Changing Change

We all carry around mental models of how things happen. Sometimes, those models prevent us from seeing things we need to see.

In particular, there's the matter of "change." I take that up in this video.

Video + Blogs = Engagement

In case you haven't noticed, video has finally come to blogging.

Next week, The TrueTalk Blog will be celebrating its fourth anniversary. We're gonna have a nice party with a bunch of other kids.

In that time, I've created 1,125 posts. And received 1,167 comments.

Now, in the past two years, I've recorded 242 videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, there's no way to know how many comments those videos have received, but, I can assure you, it's a lot more than the 250 or so they'd have received if the ratio was the same as that on this blog. A lot more. Fifty or more comments per video is common; hundreds, occasional.

Well, the question I have to ask myself is, "why"?

I guess one answer is that my written blog posts don't interest readers enough to leave comments. While I do have a few loyal commenters out there (hi, Mike!) others are sporadic.

Another answer might be that I'm a better at expressing ideas using the spoken word than in writing. That's possible, too.

Still another might be that video, itself, is inherently more engaging than writing. I'm certainly not ready to settle for that as the answer, but it does strike me that the emotional connection between two people is immediate and compelling in video. At least that's been my experience.

Regardless, what we now see are blogs are using more and more video material to illustrate points. That video might be created by the blogger her/himself or it may be video produced by someone else on which the blogger wishes to comment.

A couple of recent announcements have made it much easier for bloggers to integrate video into our sites.

First, a couple of weeks ago, our friend Loic Le Meur at still-in-beta Seesmic announced a the release of a Wordpress plug-in that enables blog readers to leave video comments on blogs. Now, Seesmic has turned on the same functionality for blogs using the Disqus comment system. We switched over to Disqus a couple of weeks ago but technical problems have ensued. We hope to be able to get them ironed out and turn on video comments here soon.

Second, today, our friend Steve Rosenbaum at Magnify.net announced several new functional enhancements for blogs. Magnify's new Publisher will make it easy for bloggers to locate and embed videos from YouTube, Google Video, blip.tv and other major video platforms. For now, Publisher works on WordPress and Movable Type blogs, but Steve tells me that other blog platforms (including TypePad) are in the queue.

This is all great news for those of us who see video as a significant enabler of emotionally-engaging interaction between people. Congrats to Loic, Steve and their teams for making it easier for bloggers to connect with their readers and viewers.

And, watch this space for some big announcements about video and community in the coming months. This is a revolution that is just beginning to gather steam.