Online Video: A Useful Lecture About Blogging
MediaBistro [see my review of this important site] has recently launched a new service: Video On Demand, drawing content from selected workshops it offers in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a few other locations. I managed to catch an on-location workshop some months back, arranging my air travel schedule to allow a layover in Los Angeles so that I could attend. It was worth it, but expensive for a non-resident. With Video On Demand, I can now enjoy a workshop from the comfort of my home.
MediaBistro is currently promoting its most recent video offering: Blogs Every Media Professional Should Know. Featured is New York media luminary Sree Sreenivasan, who also serves as Dean of Students at Columbia University’s prestigious journalism school. I decided to give it a try, partly because of my interest in the subject, partly out of curiousity about the new Video On Demand service. At $29.95 for a full evening workshop running over 3 hours, I considered it a bargain, a heck of a lot cheaper than an airline ticket, motel room and workshop enrollment fee.
After enrolling online, I received an email with links to the lecture, which was helpfully segmented into seventeen parts to facilitate viewing. Also included was a downloadable PDF “crib sheet” and a link to additional notes from Sreenivasan’s website, truly valuable “take-aways” from the lecture.
Sreenivasan is an engaging speaker, and the video itself is interesting enough with two camera angles and frequent cut-aways to illustrative computer screenshots. The audio is excellent.
The video lecture is available only in “streaming” format — no downloads onto one’s hard disk allowed. I hope this practice is changed in the future, as viewing would be much easier from one’s hard drive. However, I can understand MediaBistro’s concern about potential misuse of downloaded material. To compensate, one has access to the lecture links for 30 days, just be sure to flag the email for easy retrieval of the lecture links.
The lecture is long, fully packed and fast-paced. I recommend viewing it over two evenings. The first nine segments provide an informative overview of the “blogsphere,” everything from terminology, basic blog features and the importance of categories, to the different kinds of blogs, strategies for finding blogs and an exhaustive list of “blogs that have made a difference.” Even though I’ve been blogging myself for some time, I learned a lot from these nine segments. Still, even neophytes will understand it all, due to Sreenivasan’s articulate explanations. Count on devoting at least an hour-and-a-half to these segments, which alone are worth the price of admission.
The final seven segments, which also take over an hour-and-a-half to view, deal mostly with how to create a blog. The pace slows down considerably during the first segment, with Sreenivasan hunched over his laptop typing in content and commands, using Google’s Blogger platorm as an example. Sadly, the video surprisingly lacks screenshots to illustrate what’s going on. In future, MediaBistro should assure that the videographers capture this kind of material, even if it must be recreated and inserted after the event. Hang in there though [or just skip the segment], as Sreenivasan fortunately moves on to additional important and better-illustrated topics, such as site statistics, monetizing a blog, video blogging, podcasts and RSS feeds.
Once you are finished, remember that you can return to any of the sixteen segments for another viewing. That’s an important feature of Video On Demand that one will never get with on-location attendance. I went back to several segments which I found particularly interesting and which went by too fast on the first viewing.
Taken altogether, I find this lecture the best and easiest to understand introduction to the blog world that I’ve yet come across. I highly recommend it.
I gather that this lecture is rather an “experiment” by MediaBistro. While it has previously offered several short and medium-length programs, running from fifteen minutes to over an hour, this lecture is the first one offered that runs so long. I personally look forward to additional full workshops which I can view at home, far from New York and Los Angeles. MediaBistro thoughtfully offers free sample clips of its video programs so that one can get a taste for buying.
A parting caution: sometimes heavy internet traffic can interfer with “video streams.” The first time I tried to watch the lecture, during high traffic morning-time, the stream was so jerky that it was unwatchable. One can solve that by pressing the “pause button” on the player to allow the stream of build up in a temporary cache file; then hit “play,” and it should run properly. Personally, I still found that a disconcerting and time-consuming process, so I scheduled my viewing for my first free evening, a wise choice as the stream then played flawlessly.
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