Dr. Richard Hall, a professor of information science and technology, has been fascinated with the World Wide Web since the middle 1990s, when it was first becoming wide spread. Hall was quick to explore the web as a teaching tool in his classes and research. In fact, he became well known in the academic research community as a pioneer in this area. More recently, he has become fascinated by the role of the web in the emerging grass roots media movement -- web-based media created and syndicated by regular people. In particular, Hall is interested in video blogs, sometimes called video podcasts.
In the fall of 2006, Hall will be teaching courses in Multimedia Development and Social Informatics, and he will be able to bring some practical experience into the classroom. Hall's video blog, The Richard Show, has gained quite a following in the vlogosphere of late. His work has even been featured on the wildly popular vlogcast, RocketBoom.
Hall has only been experimenting with video blogging for about a year. He says he'd never even used a video camera, or video editing tools, much until then. He was inspired by vlogs he watched on the Internet, which, he maintains, were much more interesting than the highly produced content on TV. Last spring, he bought a hand-held recorder, and then he learned how to edit and post videos beginning with the steps on the FreeVlog website. He has also gotten a lot of support from the very active video blogging community, via the Yahoo video blogging group. "I never had a plan as far as content goes," Hall says.
His first video was of a raccoon trying to eat out of a bird feeder. Another early effort was a simple video of Hall and his wife, Maureen, at a St. Louis restaurant. This caught the attention of RocketBoom’s host, Amanda Congdon. Hall's most popular video to date was a parody of the news (a parody of a parody) on RocketBoom, which as been downloaded more than 3,000 times. One of the most recent videos posted at The Richard Show features Hall and his dog, who make up the charter members of the Ozarks Polar Bear Club. The man jumps in the winter water, but his dog declines.
The popularity of vlogs doesn't surprise Hall. “The trend up until recently was media distribution controlled by fewer and fewer very large and powerful entities -- push media where a few people make it and distribute it and the vast majority of us are passive consumers," he says. "I think people are just now starting to really understand the incredible potential of the Internet driven by the web and broadband availability. This allows for a kind of democratization of media that’s really exciting, where anyone can have a voice, through distribution of media to the whole world with very little overhead.
"You don’t have to be famous and you don’t have to have special connections. With these new models it’s much more of an interactive dialogue among media producers, distributors, and consumers. There are a lot of very creative people out there, with a lot of interesting and entertaining things to say, and suddenly they’ve got a way to say it and distribute it. It’s very cool."
Richard Show FOREEEVERRRR!!!
How interesting. I checked out The Richard Show.
I had never thought of using video for blogging. However, I do a lot of videotaping of short clips with the movie mode on my digital camera. A pretty cheap camera I might add...but it gets the job done! It also makes it easy to upload the video's to the web or to place them on CD's. This is important for me because I have a daughter with a rare chromosomal disorder. She has epilepsy too. So when she's having seizures, I can use my movie mode and record the seizures, upload the video to the web, and then email the link to her neurologist who is several hours away from here so that he can see exactly what is going on. The videos give a much better description to him than what my words describing the seizure activity could ever do....plus it allows the neurologist to see things I might have missed (such as if her eyes are turning to one side, etc) to help pinpoint if it is a focal seizure or a generalized one.
I've also found that taking videoclips helps to show other parents of kids with a diagnosis like my daughter what possibilities can be achieved by our children. It is as if 'seeing' is believing!! An example of this is, my daughter is currently learning PECS= picture exchange communication system, since she is and will remain nonverbal. My daughter mastered phase I of PECS within 3 weeks. I told the story to the listserv I was on and included a videoclip to show individuals how well my daughter could do it. Since showing the videoclip, it has been a huge encouraging and motivating factor of other parents wanting their children to learn PECS.