Time for New Media Again
Tuesday over in Notes I asked is it time to bring the focus back to new media again? Over the past couple of weeks I have been playing with podcasts and vidcasts and have had great success with each and I am beginning to wonder why we aren’t seeing more of this interactivity on our own sites or even business sites? I’m not preaching that we make a return to all Flash sites, but in this broadband everywhere world wouldn’t offering something a bit more give you that advantage you have been seeking?
I think the web will always be ruled by text and rightfully so, but there are limitations to working in a text only web. I can write about how I work, or I can show you how I work. Which one do you think is more effective?
Should all your vital information and important messages be only in audio or video form? Of course not, but they should complement the text on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice on the Company’s About page where you list bios to have text and a video so people get to actually see the person and hear what they have to say about themselves. Sure you can have pictures up, but that doesn’t give you that much insight into the person.
Maybe an issue is that so many of us creatives aren’t comfortable with trying new channels of creativity. Once you get into the web design groove it’s easy to want to stay in that comfortzone without having to push your limits any further. If that’s the case, do you think a time will come where you will get left behind? In general though, why don’t you think we are seeing a push into new formats of passing along information and communicating? YouTube and MySpace have shown how effective video and audio are to the masses so why aren’t we exploiting these channels more?
I think you can go even further. In general, most people do not want to read a lot. I think most would rather look, listen, watch, and interact.
By drdon on April 27, 2006 1:45 pm
Agreed, but you have to keep in mind that wasting their time with downloading audio and video and then it not being quality may piss them off more than just skimming some words on a page.
By Scrivs on April 27, 2006 2:00 pm
The buzzword of “new media” is taking the journalism industry by storm, papers are slowly making the transition to the web, and video/multimedia projects are in really high demand. I am not really sure if the industry understands what they are looking for though, and we have a New Media program in the photojournalism dept at my University…it’s a common debate
By blinks on April 27, 2006 4:37 pm
The sheer volume of these kinds of media would make it hard to handle if it was anything close to the amount of text we take in. I can barely keep up with my text feeds and have no chance at keeping up with pod and video casts. However, I do think these things could support each other very effectively. We should work towards that.
By Stephen on April 27, 2006 5:02 pm
I completely agree. Most days I wonder if the fact that we’re so comfortable after getting an understanding and grasp of comunicating through static text coupled with static images, designers are scared of incorporating other elements, and, going through the learning curves associated with that.
Perhaps vulnerability is the key with all of this. Designers are certainly scared to make mistakes, even though with the medium we work in it’s so easy to correct.
By Joshua Blount on April 27, 2006 11:12 pm
But you have to keep in mind that wasting their time with downloading audio and video and then it not being quality may piss them off more than just skimming some words on a page.
YouTube and MySpace have shown how effective video and audio are to the masses so why aren’t we exploiting these channels more?
I think people would be even more loyal to sites like YouTube and MySpace if they were spoonfed recommendations and news more easily. Which is where RSS and subscription-based media really makes sense — no more weeding through the dreck. I realize both sites have this functionality, but I wonder how intuitive it is to most folks, or how much they use it.
I’m currently helping a friend design a music site heavy on archiving live performances and wrapping the audio and video in XML for subscriptions. Users are definitely becoming more open to concepts of podcasting, but we’ve found the learning curve for actually subscribing and understanding subscriptions has not been easy for them. Some would rather sift thru tons of content that doesn’t interest them than figure out how to subscribe only to the content they want.
So maybe more bandwidth + widespread comprehension of concepts like RSS might finally shift the emphasis away from texty sites. Or not ;)
By Darren Hoyt on April 28, 2006 5:26 pm
Congrats you are on your favorite website SvN.
By Ken on May 3, 2006 5:35 pm