Bloggers have moved into a new dimension - streaming video.
Tomas Rawlings logs on to find the cream of the crop
SOURCE The Independent
Rocketboom http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/
The vblog that everybody is talking about. Based in New York, Rocketboom is a professional production that offers a daily story over five days a week on a whole range of cultural, arts and technology issues. It is a convergence of blogging and the evening news. It has its own anchor, correspondents in various US cities as well as a couple in Europe. It distributes its content over the net via video streaming, uses peer-to-peer technology (via BitTorrent), is PlayStation Portable compatible and is good! This is new, new media and not to be missed.
Future Media http://FutureMedia.org
Future Media is the work of new-media video journalists. It's been going only a few months but already has notched up a pretty impressive array of videos featuring various internet and technology industry professionals talking about their subject at length. Its subject matter very much evangelises new media but is a great way to access technology news in full as opposed to the few sound-bites that normally appear on TV. The Mac-orientated site's videos are in QuickTime, though there is support offered for Windows.
The 05 Project http://www.noservicecharge.com/videoblog/
This vblog is a work of pure effort - this project aims to post a video blog for every single day of 2005. No mean feat, and its UK creator Ian Mills is well on the way to achieving this Herculean task (plus he offers video in both QuickTime and Windows Media Player formats). As for the content itself, the videos vary in quality from funny to dry but are more often than not witty slices of his life. In the words of the vblog's creator: "I'm sure out of 365 videos some of them will suck. It's not like you pay to watch them anyway." Good point.
Vlog~Flux http://FluxRostrum.BlogSpot.com
The experience of hitting the campaign trail in 2003 to cover the presidential election for the radical candidate Dennis Kucinich gave Vlog-Flux the road trip bug. Since then he has given up his life in LA to travel the US, "to document the end of the facade of democracy". This site shows how the predominately one-way dialogue between the media and the audience is eroding fast. The videos are well produced and edited and the vblog is packed full of news, links, images and information, and frequently bites back at mainstream media coverage of events.
