Video Blogging - Is it the Future?

Everywhere you look, more and more people are jumping aboard the video blogging bandwagon. Matt Cutts, Google’s own SEO expert, has done quite a few video blog posts lately. Just this morning, I read a post at Problogger about blogging tutorials - in video format, called Tubetorial. Some are saying that video blogging is the future of blogging, and that one day that will be the only way to read blogs.

I think that video blogging is more of a fad, or perhaps a niche market. Some people do enjoy the personalization that video blogging offers - so I’m fairly certain that video blogging is here to stay. However, I’m not convinced that there’s a big market for these types of blogs. You are probably wondering why I say this. Why would a person rather read paragraphs rather than watch an entertaining video? Don’t more people watch the news rather than read the newspaper?

Video blogging, by it’s very nature, isn’t a very friendly format. For example - I cannot watch video blog posts from my Treo smartphone - that’s a real problem. Often that’s how I access my RSS reader, or individual blogs. You Tube and Google Videos don’t yet work on many mobile devices, and certainly not efficiently. I also cannot view video blog posts at work. Let’s face it - many people spend some of their work day doing personal things - such as reading blogs. Video and sound do not lend themselves to inconspicuousness. ( I think that’s the biggest word I’ve ever used in a sentence. ) For those people not fortunate enough to have internet access at home, video blogs are not very appropriate for places like public libraries, and other public internet access areas.

In closing, video blogging is an interesting trend - but it’s not the future of blogging. Good old fashioned text is - because it works.

Leroy Brown
Blogging Blog

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Leroy_Brown

Is "Green" the Latest Web Hosting Gimmick?

I guess one of the benefits of a little experience is that you begin to be able to spot not only trends, but also cycles in the business (technically, that’s the purpose of this blog).
I don’t imagine, however, that it requires a tremendous amount of experience, or expertise, to notice the frequency with which “green” hosting comes up these days. In terms of press releases and marketing material, I would estimate that just now, I hear more about Web hosts’ “green” attributes than any other.
“Green” hosting, it seems, is well on its way to being the new Web 2.0, or software-as-a-service – the latest gimmick in the Web hosting business.
By that I mean that, like Web 2.0 or SaaS, green endeavors in the hosting business address a pressing need (the fact that data center facilities are consuming energy resources at a tremendous, and growing, rate), and admirably so. But hosts have been swept up in the green notion to the point where just about everybody in the business feels the pressure to present themselves as “green.”
One product of that mentality is that (as happened with Web 2.0 and SaaS), instead of asking “what can we do to provide our services in a more environmentally friendly way?” hosting providers are asking “how can we describe our services in an environmentally friendly light?”
Last week I received a press release from SWsoft, pointing out the energy-saving virtues of virtualization, and including a quote:
"Virtuozzo delivers the highest density available in a virtualization solution, enabling hundreds of virtual environments on a single physical server, and so it offers the greatest potential for energy savings," said Serguei Beloussov, CEO of SWsoft. "By using Virtuozzo to achieve their green computing goals, hosting providers can significantly reduce their energy usage while also realizing greater efficiency in their data center."
Just a few days earlier, I received a message from NaviSite, describing the energy efficient properties of outsourcing:
NaviSite has found that an outsourced IT model can be up to 50% more energy efficient than building a data center for many companies. In general, it takes far less electricity to run a large, energy efficient data center than it does to sustain multiple, smaller installations. So, by consolidating resources, NaviSite's customers are conserving the earth's resources in much the same way carpooling does.
Neither of these statements is incorrect, exactly. Nor are the assertions unethical. But they’re pretty concrete evidence that “green” has become the latest Web hosting buzzword.
What’s more, they help to confuse the understanding of what we might mean when we say “green hosting” (a term whose definition was already far too confused). Confusion doesn’t help hosting providers, it doesn’t help consumers and it certainly doesn’t help the environment. It dilutes the value of green hosting in general, and it diminishes the efforts of those hosting providers who have gone to great lengths to make their operations environmentally friendly.
That’s the real problem with buzzwords. Everybody picks up on them. And everybody applies them. And their ubiquity eliminates their ability to identify anything at all. Try to find an application that isn’t described as “Web 2.0.” Or host that doesn’t tout its SaaS credentials. It’s not easy. And in a few months, I’ll bet, it’ll be more than a little difficult to locate a host that isn’t “green.”
Of course, one of the results of this buzz is no doubt an increase in the overall effort to make IT environmentally friendly. That’s a good thing.
And the media in general is starting to cut through some of the green hype. on the growing environmental impact of the data center business, and the many ways (including some that I’ve mentioned here) that IT companies are trying to go green, puts it pretty succinctly:
“It's a lot easier to put out a news release than to build a data center with a significantly smaller environmental footprint.”

Blogging effective marketing tool for Wabash College

With innovations in technology, you can do almost anything online, including reach potential college recruits.

Online blogs have become a major tool for recruiting students at Wabash College. Last year, the college tinkered with the idea of blogs written by three freshmen. The blogs would be unedited — posted just as they were written. Wabash employees could have cleaned up some of the work, but opted against it.

The idea worked better than expected. So much so that Wabash has again picked three incoming freshmen to blog about their first year of college. Daniel King, one of last year’s student bloggers, will continue blogging on his entire four-year college experience.

Associate Director of Admissions Chip Timmons said the blogging has been beneficial for incoming students.

“For a lot of students looking here, they want to hear from students,” Timmons said. “They want to know what the food tastes like, how hard the classes are. It’s honest, it’s genuine and it’s what students want to know.”

The student blogs have become so popular, the three incoming freshmen writing this year — Jake Ezell, Indianapolis; Michael Richmond, Franklin; and Adrian Perez, south Texas — has already received more hits on the homepage than anything on the Wabash site, aside from football.

Wabash Web Editor Howard Hewitt heard at a Chicago seminar that 80 percent of students have their first contact with the college they attend by Internet. While Wabash has blogs on a plethora of topics, the student-written blogs remain the most popular.

Wabash’s decision to have blogs online again this year drew 50 interested students wishing to keep a running tally of their first year at the college. From there, Wabash employees had to whittle it down to three students, looking for enough variety to cover a wide range of students. Though two of this year’s bloggers are from central Indiana, one is from a private high school and the other went to public school.

“We want different interest and different backgrounds,” said Timmons. “We wanted to make sure there was a little bit of everything from everybody.”

During the narrowing process, the college’s staff looks at who makes the best case for why they want to blog, who can write well and how eager they are to share their stories, Timmons said. And of course the question is asked to each about whether they’d want their mother to read it.

The first blogs of Perez, Richmond and Ezell can be read at on Wabash’s homepage wabash.edu.

SOURCE : www.journalreview.com