Video + Audio + Blogosphere = The Next Big Thing?

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame did a 15-minute video at Blog Nashville where he primarily focused on gathering thoughts from bloggers about Making Money with Blogging.

From a technical standpoint, he used the on-camera microphone and had the autofocus on the camera turned on, which meant that the sound was a little iffy and his shots were constantly going in and out of focus. But it was well-edited and had a great round-up of some of the current buzz on the blogosphere.

Reynolds perceived that the ">hot topics at the conference were making money with blogging as well as:

The other new emphasis was video. There are a lot of videobloggers now, and this conference featured a lot more video being shown, and taken. There was a crew of documentary filmmakers making a movie on blogging, but they were outnumbered several-to-one by amateurs capturing video for live streams or for posting.

So it looks like I'm going to be hitting an interesting window where video and audio are going to be a lot bigger on the web. At this point, it seems that most of the vloggers are bloggers first and filmmakers second. Even though I'm not making any money on filmmaking yet, I consider myself to be a documentary filmmaker first and blogger second.

This transitional phase is going to be dominated by early adopters until the more experienced documentary filmmakers start making their presense online. At some point, quality content and well-edited films are going to capture the most attention of the masses. But for now, the early adopters are learning about filmmaking as they go along and the people who have the most interesting things to say will capture the most attention.

I hope to be one of those earlier adopters who has some technical background in filmmaking AND something to say. I'm open sourcing the text of my Echo Chamber interviews -- and I've been thinking about open sourcing the audio and the video as well as the project progresses.

I've even been considering streaming the video online for free, and having my business model based upon selling DVDs. There are still A LOT of people who would prefer to watch movies on television -- especially if you want to watch it with other people. So I know that there are technologists who will watch the film on their computer screens, but I know that my wife and parents would still prefer the DVD version.

Dan Gillmor gave away electronic copies of his book for free, and I read on his blog at some point that it recently went into another printing. So I'm certainly open to publishing the film on OurMedia.org at the same time the DVD is ready to be released as long as I meet a number of milestones where I'm more confident that I can make a return on this three-year investment of time and money.