Day: February 13, 2009

Video is rubbish

I’ve had an idea in the back of my head for ages for a post on how fundamentally rubbish video is as a medium on the Internet. (Rough outline: it’s not the quality/bandwidth/storage capacity issue – that’s a problem still, but will fade. It’s fundamental to the nature of high-intensity visual media. You can’t skim. Reading speed is way higher than spoken speed. Audio suffers similarly but you are usually doing something else while you listen. In an attention economy, video is far and away the most expensive format. Lauren Weinstein, writing in RISKS earlier this year, makes the contrary case that you need video to capture subtleties of expression.)

I was prodded again by Martin’s recent discussion about David After Dentist, the latest viral video. (Outline notes: I think that what this shows is that viral stuff, especially videos, are the antithesis of what higher education is about – very surface, very little consideration or thought required.)

But now I’ve been prodded by some solid proof that video is terrible – just take a look at these videos of me on YouTube.

Here’s me talking about my talk last week on Scholarly Publishing 2.0:


Here’s me talking about the Biodiversity Observatory late last year:

And here’s me saying Learning Design is going to be big, five years ago at a Lab Group meeting:

On the plus side, these are all good ideas. (Latching on to LD five years ago looks prescient, though I hadn’t grokked that the thing that would get it to scale was to relax the stringent standards thing.)

On the negative side: it takes an awfully long time to grasp these ideas from the videos. That’s partly an artefact of my dreadful presentational style (I’m aware of my propensity to um and ah, but these make it painfully obvious – and note to self: look at the camera, dum-dum, not shiftily all over the place – and letting that experimental beard be captured for posterity was a terrible mistake). But it’s largely because video is such a slow medium.

Scholarly Publishing 2.0

I gave a short talk on the future of scholarly publishing at the OLnet/OU “Researcher 2.0” event last week, which I liveblogged in two parts (part 1, part 2.0).

You can see my slides:

Scholarly Publishing 2.0

View more presentations from dougclow. (tags: publishing web2)

You can watch a video of me talking about what I was talking about:


You can read Gráinne Conole’s liveblog of me giving the talk, which is part of the Cloudscape covering the entire event.

And … you can read this quick condensed text version: I argued that scholarly publishing is what scholars do when they make things public. I discuss some of the dramatic changes underway. I argue that they are quantitative (more and faster) rather than fundamental ones of type – but of course a quantitative shift on this scale is in itself qualitative. Determining what’s important and high-quality in the context of this information explosion is hard, but is essentially what peer review – broadly considered – is there to do. The Open Access movement is hugely important in social justice terms, but in terms of enabling access for researchers at well-funded institutions it’s small beer. (Thought it’s worth mentioning that there’s evidence that open-access material gets cited more, which is (a) a good thing, and (b) will get you REF points.)