--- In [email protected], "Heath" <heathpa...@...> wrote:
> So I go back to my first statement and ask, Is RSS in effect part of > the problem? Is it so easy now to just watch that we are becoming > passive? That we no longer care about the communication or the > connections that can develop? I think it has to be horses for courses and you have to package content a number of ways to cater to individual preferences. People approach the web differently and no one size fits all. As for connections and the community feel you have to go with the flow...You cannot demand that people hang out the way you'd prefer them to as, I guess, that's has as much to do with your own personality and video-ing attitude as anything else. The hardware -- the feed, the site -- are surely secondary to that. I think discussion lists can make -- potentially at least -- great communities -- but not all discussion lists are going to foster ongoing interactions in the sense of identification and 'loyalty'. I'm on 'x' number of elists and monitor 'y' number of blogs but I choose to interact actively in very few of them. It's like there's this Holy Grail on the web that presumes that if you do 'a' and 'b' you get yourself a bona fide web neighborhood. I don't think it works lineally like that.People do not have that capacity unless they are obsessive. However, the very nature of videoblogging -- because it can often be so intimate and exposing -- tends to push the engagement onto the visitor in a way that other media may not. This is why, in part I believe, video deployment on the web has exploded in the way that audio has not.Its' very: me. So in one sense there's all these TV channels being created whose precept is that they are not like console television but something else that is still as yet an unknown. An contrary example I think is the Miro/Democracy Player which tries to foster a counter media network driven by RSS feeds. Surely that's one community model that relies on an aggregation broader than individual stall holders. Then there is YouTube which is -- to be frank -- a video jungle. But you are going to get many layers and variations and it would be presumptuous to think that one broadcast model will rule them all. This is the web afterall which is premised on anarchy and a good deal of chaos. This is partly why its so hard to make money off the web I guess because in a universe of that size and of such creativity (an extraordinary explosion of creativity the likes of which we humans have never seen before) it's so very easy to be fickle. MySpace one year/Facebook the next. So when you create your own share of it -- "your" "site" --you are creating a decorated portal or cabinet where you display your personal wares -- customized just so to reflect on its owner. If that's not your preference then you may as well simply stick with the feed option and forget all about the branding thing with its little decorative nuances and written up additions. Therss' nothing wrong with that. dave riley
