I always thought Richard BF was too fixated, in an almost unhealthy way, on the need to classify videoblogging as a genre and control the debate.
It was a strongly held personal point of view, and one that was disputed. Personally, I don't agree with him. Many of us do not, and not just out of intellectual stupidity or out of some misguided romanticism or need to aggrandize the videoblog. And I don't think one side has to *win*. Patrick, in the comments of Richard's definition on his blog http:// www.kashum.com/blog/1156867771, agreed with him about genre. In a small community, one person can hold disproportionate power just by doing more than anyone else is prepared to. It's a difficult balance - you want people to lead, and get involved - but you don't want them to do too much or their opinion dominates to the detriment of other valid (but more quietly voiced) opinions. The power of deletion is one of the most powerful of all for someone like this to hold. It's dispiriting, and it kills discussion. It's a disaster in a scenario like this, where there are different opinions on a concrete subject that has not been academically researched. The ideal scenario when one person is wielding disproportionate power is that the whole community makes their opinions heard - and when there are differences of opinion as to a definition, as there are here, a middle path is followed - a compromise is reached. The people who want it all their own way will say that that's what they're doing - that Wikipedia is not a place for opinions and original research, and so they delete everything that's not sourced. One group of purists wanted to delete the video blog entry completely at one point, and it almost happened, which would have been absurd IMO. Richard BF blamed this proposed deletion on the messy discussions in the entry to try and bolster his own point, which was not true - the deletion was part of a wider semantic cleansing program by people who wanted to strip down definitions relating to blogging. I don't think it's particularly helpful to get back into the polarised discussions of whether it's a genre, a sub-genre, whether it exists at all. Let's have an entry that acknowledges the disagreements in a simple paragraph or two, and moves on to embrace all sides of the definition. That will be a far more informative entry for people wanting an authoritative reference. But we won't get there if we keep getting every addition deleted. Rupert http://twittervlog.blogspot.com/ http://www.twitter.com/ruperthowe/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/twittervlog/ On 1 May 2007, at 08:44, Michael Verdi wrote: A little historical context (not complete, I need to sleep sometime tonight)... Adrian Miles has written much about videoblogging: http://vogmae.net.au/content/blogcategory/26/47/ http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=74 I didn't exactly agree - http://michaelverdi.com/index.php/2005/02/20/vlog-anarchy/ Adrian's response (reason #875 why Creative Commons kicks ass btw) - http://vogmae.net.au/vlog/?p=433 Eight months before Patrick started videoblogging Richard BF had already tried to shepherd a vlog entry on Wikipedia but was frustrated by constant fighting. Check out this post by him from June 2005 - http://www.kashum.com/blog/1118369215 and the video - http://tinyurl.com/2dd2dy This is what the article looked like before all the editing that he talks about happened - http://tinyurl.com/27kyht January 2006 the VlogTheory list started - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vlogtheory - pretty much died out after Vloggercon 2006 I did a couple of experiments (April 2006) on what a videoblog is and Richard wrote a bit also. http://michaelverdi.com/index.php/2006/04/06/experiment/ http://michaelverdi.com/index.php/2006/04/08/experiment-2/ Richard BF replies: http://www.kashum.com/blog/1144417173 and later writes a definition of videoblogging - http://www.kashum.com/blog/1156867771 (Check out all of the discussion on these posts - about 120 comments all told - for the most part these ideas didn't go over very well) It seems Patrick got interested in the Wikipedia entry shortly after Vloggercon 2006 and by July he had pretty much whacked down what was left of the already sparse article. So Meiser came along and put a lot of effort into the article. Here's one of his early attempts: http://tinyurl.com/ysrk6q Three weeks later all changes were gone - http://tinyurl.com/ywhq8o Recently Patrick has been pretty good about reverting people's changes within minutes. Check out his warnings to Meiser on his talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mmeiser As I said at the beginning, there is much missing from this email. I just put a little bit of this out there for those who would rush off to tackle the wikipedia entry. Please look at what's been done before. - Verdi [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
