VideoVoo: Online Video Marketing

Vlogs, vlogging, vlog consumption is becoming each day more and more exciting, great vlog hosts are coming out on the web, Lindsay Campbell, Joanne Colan, and now BoingBoing co-editor Xeni Jardin, just to name but a few. BoingBoing TV has launched on Oct 3 2007. Unlike Rocketboom or Wallstrip though, Boing Boing TV has got a brief summary about the video clip, which is great (more user and search friendly) and it is definitely a tip for Rocketboom to move on with (Wallstrip has a tiny sentence, less than enough). And unlike Wallstrip, BBTV is not available on many a site. Including iTunes, as one of the commenters on BoingBoing has remarked.

Wired News: Why did Boing Boing launch a daily video show? Aren’t you people busy enough as it is?

Xeni Jardin: Yes — and that’s why it took us so long. We first met seriously about it late last year, and began hashing out how to do this in a way that feels like a natural, sustainable extension of the blog. We were not just trying to create some new thing to sell ads against, any more than Boing Boing was created as something to sell ads against. It began as a fanzine, as you correctly pointed out, in 1989. It was something Mark (Frauenfelder) and his wife Carla Sinclair paid out of pocket to do in print, and then all of us paid to keep the servers going until someone finally kicked some sense into us and said, “Look, this could be a job; you could get paid so that you have more time to do this. … So with this video show, we stumble across stories, people, places or ideas of interest and the immediate question is, “How can this thing best be captured in video?” Sometimes that means bringing somebody into the studio who’s — we like to call them “happy mutants” — people that are doing weird, eccentric, interesting stuff. Or we might go to places where they’re building robots, or take a tour through the Los Alamos labs — maybe we’ll try to sneak through a friend there, or something.”

The name BBTV came automatically for the BoingBoing team. However, it will clash with Big Brothers TV for Technorati & YouTube tags, so it may not be such an ideal name after all. BoingTV is my suggestion. Anyway, Xeni is something like a geek queen - not simply self-proclaimed. But it does not mean that she is unanimously loved. She has been around for a long time in blogging about sci-fi, the Burning Man festival, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, bio-DIY, what have you.

“Sometimes the trailer can be better than the movie.” This is Xeni’s opening sentence for BoingBoing TV on October 4th. And we can add that internet TV can be far more interesting than traditional TV. BBTV has come with the usual colorful kaleidoscope of ’strange is beautiful’: Vintage trailers from Hell with Hitchcock, B movies with breathtaking excitement in B movie style, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes from 1963, plus a controversial Hot-hot line in Toronto for getting lobotomized (which apparently some of the callers have found coming handy for more brain space while others were outraged and/or disgusted).

The video is interrupted by a shouting red Creative Commons ad, but I wonder what other techniques they will soon start using. Will there be an interactive QT overlay ad (developed by Jared Klett & Allan Grinshtein and aided by Dennis Backus and Josh Paul of Aweli)?

PS: I wish Clotilde Dusoulier on Chocolate and Zucchini turned her cooking blog into a vlog, but no sign of it yet.