It’s just a Gift: In Search of a Vlog Audience
I got great joy out of producing my latest Vlog. It’s about a baby shower, which I edited into what I thought was a very amusing little keepsake for our friends Tim and Alec.
I think it will appeal to the people who were at the shower and to anyone who knows Tim and Alec. But not to a larger audience. So probably we are dealing with a few dozen viewers. However, I might have produced something that the family will keep for decades. So that is a fairly nice little gift. In fact, when I showed it as a demo, the first thing a woman said upon seeing it was, “What a great idea for gifts.”
Which got me to thinking about what kind of audiences the average citizen can expect from producing Vlogs. First anyone can use them in the tradition of the more than decade old art of digital storytelling. The baby shower I guess falls into that category. A popular genre for digital storytelling is gathering the artifacts from a life and turning them into a visual story. The BBC has a site for them and the Digital Storytelling Center in California does workshops worldwide.
On the event side, in the near future you will be able to capture events like the baby shower and quickly upload them to places like Ourmedia.org, where your friends and family can view them. At the same time you can burn them as CDs for the gift factor.
The next step up for vlogging might be for events like local football games. Occasionally a local TV station might give a local high school game a minute or two of footage, but that is it. A group of high school vloggers could turn each game into a bigger piece. Thereby attracting several hundred people from the school. So I predict a phalanx of sports vloggers in the future.
Indeed, any event with audience allegiance begs to be vlogged. Of course, as the event gets more impersonal and more mass marketed, then it becomes the purview of the mass media.
So if you want to vlog to more than your friends or family, unless you are numa numa, think in terms of something bigger than a birthday party, but smaller than a professional sporting event. And you can make a difference or at least get heard and seen.
