Reuters Editors

Has Video Killed the Blogging Star?

This was the title of a panel I joined at the Social Media Influence event earlier this week in London. It was a slightly tongue-in-cheek question from Matthew Yeomans, one of the conference’s organisers, but interesting because it touches on a number of current trends — the phenomenal rise of video usage on the Web, the success of user-generated video sites and the impression that, perhaps, blogging has become a bit passe. Just this week we’ve seen a new study show that online video consumption has nearly doubled in the past year while new social video services are growing very quickly and Youtube recently appointed a citizen video news editor.

This was the full brief:

Okay, we’re joking…..sort of. But be it video-snacking, YouTube resumes, digital video activism or live-streaming to the web from your mobile phone, the world of Web 2.0 is being driven by the moving image. This panel will examine the role video is playing in shaping communication techniques within companies as well as helping reach new consumer audiences.

In a way the event answered the question itself. One of the participants, the BBC’s Robin Hamman, who I had thought was going to be on the panel instead streamed the proceedings live via his mobile phone to Qik where it is now archived. So now I’m thinking why blog about the event when you can see the whole thing on Qik? And, in my case, why write a note to my boss when I can just point him to the full recording and (slightly scary thought) he can make up his own mind on how it went?

In preparing for the event I did a couple of things. First, I thought about my professional experience within Reuters. We’ve got perhaps a couple of hundred journalists blogging on a regular basis but just a handful video blogging. That’s partly because video is still a bit tricky while blogging is relatively easy since, in essence, it’s just a text-based content management system and nearly all our journalists are writing on a very regular basis.