Suggestions for Webb Alert and other Video Bloggers

Over the past few years the the number of blogs on the internet has increased exponentially. There are over 50 million blogs on the web. Over past couple years it has increasingly become hard for subscribers to keep track of blogs and good posts. I have 50+ blogs on my netvibes, where thousands of posts are constantly bombarded at me. It is increasingly getting difficult to track interesting posting anymore.

Some of the top bloggers, who have understood the problem introduced new features like “Weekly Summary”, “Top Posts” etc. Recently bloggers are playing with video blogging. Now the concept has been around for sometime. However its prominence as a serious blogging (or should I say vlogging) tool is becoming obvious now. Bloggers like Robert Scoble (with his PodTech shows) and Om Malik (with his “The GigaOm TV“) are leading by example. Although not immensly detailed, these online shows are becoming a great way of summarizing interesting stories and focussing on the hottest areas for the week (or day). Apart from summarizing these shows are enabling top bloggers to have a bigger media presence. Webb Alert is the latest entrant in this space (launched Aug 2).

Webb Alert is a great show which simply presents the hottest stories of the day. This is a great way to catch up with stories in just 15 minutes. They have also done a great job by making it easy to get feeds and add to your iTunes podcast list. Not to mention that Morgan Webb herself is very refreshing. Here is the latest show:

Such shows are very valuable as the user can simply get a summary of the day and the blogs (who get featured) get good publicity. However this is just the beginning and there is a good long way to go here. In my previous post I talk about ideas for video sites around next level of monetization. Here are some of my recommendations for Webb Alert and other similar video bloggers.Make it Interactive
These online video posts are a great source of information. However they have to be much more interactive than what’s available now. Unlike TV broadcasts, online shows enjoy technologies like Flash for content rendering, which offers multiple features for involving the end users.URL links on Flash shows
One of the best features for Webb Alert would be to include URL links to blogs and websites, which are being covered in the show. For example if Morgan is talking about a post on Kotaku, then a button on the corner should allow the users to access that story in a different browser window. Some of these stories are interesting and it will be great to have such links for users to read them further. Google video ads enable this feature flawlessly. Moreover adding such links could become an ad opportunity as well.Tagging and Searching
Today’s blog posts are easily search-able. Bloggers go to lengths to add keywords and tags to ensure that readers can easily find them. Over time when these video postings get ubiquitous, viewers will run into issues where searching video posts on a particular topic will be hard. Video bloggers must enable features like “Deep Video Tagging” to make theses posts search and organization friendly. Technologies like deep frame tagging are already available from services like MotionBox. Once again, this strategy will help with the ads.

Community and Sharing
These video posts are very viral in nature. The general community will love to comment on them with feedback (positive and negative). In addition people would love to have community discussions around these. Such phenomenon is obvious within Digg. Video bloggers must enable such community features, which will allow users to converse about these topics. In addition to typical features, video bloggers should let users reference specific sections of a video post. As there maybe multiple topics covered within a post, utilizing deep tagging for community conversations shall be very helpful.

Easy Distribution
I think most bloggers have done a good job here by using flash and enabling feeds for their posts. However in addition they should employ some or all of the following:

• Direct download link to iTunes
• “Send To” feature for users to send videos to friends
• Deliver to mobile handset
  • MMS is prevalent with most carriers. Bloggers should work with MMS aggregation companies in order to deliver their video posts to mobile handsets.
  • This will also allow bloggers to leverage mobile ads, which typically bring in more revenue.

I hope these ideas help these pioneers of the blogosphere and viewers like us can better, richer and interactive content.