What is the Video Blogging Community Like? A Study from 2007
John Warmbrodt, a 25 year-old Missouri grad student, has made a long study with the aim to map vloggers’ community. The title of his 91 page thesis is An Exploratory Study of the Videoblogger’s Community. In his abstract he is stating that “A social network analysis of the linking patterns of 74 personal vloggers was performed.” It rings the bell on how Sergey Brin and Larry Page started their study and engine on organizing the world’s information. Now vlogging relations, just like blogging networks, can be best discovered through blogrolls and commenters’ links. So it sounds a good starting point. But John adss that vloggers also communicate in real life (beyond simply expressing relations with links). They meet each other in events like VloggerCon.
He has made interviews with 13 personal vloggers. What would be truly great, and true to a Vlogging community study, if he had these interviews public and in a video format, plus distributed on the actual vloggers’ video blogs. John, do you have some of them? Podcasts maybe?
I do not share his definition for video blogs though. John’s vlogs sound ‘pure video blogs’ for me. “Video blogs (or vlogs) are blogs where each post is a video. Although the posts may also include text, providing context for the video, the focus of each post is a video. ”
The way I define vlog for everyday use is a loose “blogs where the share of video content is significant, and most of the the video content is made by the author(s).” Vlogs, for me, do not necessarily include videos for each and every post, maybe not even 50%. Plus vlogs may not feature the authors visually, but simply reflect the creative endeavour of the journal caretakers. But enough of definition. Let’s see the lessons to be learned.
In general, the conclusions of the vlog study are not shocking, surprising or even revelatory. Rather, they are pretty predictable. But the video blog study as a whole gives a good intro for those who wish to delve into vlogging like web sociologists, newbie video marketers, self-reflective vloggers, etc.
..the vlogging community is highly decentralized and exhibits a core/periphery structure, indicating that the group consists of a core group of active participants and a peripheral group of significantly less active participants. In addition, the results indicate that the characteristics of the vlogging community are similar to text blogging in a number of ways, including the community’s highly interactive and social nature. However, results also indicate that the rich nature of the communication afforded by the video medium allows for a more personal, intimate, and empathetic interaction. Further, the low barrier to entry enabled by inexpensive tools and web distribution is an important
motivational factor for vloggers.
Thanks to Richard for featuring the study in his new chapter on the history of video blogging.