Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

More bloggers move on to moving pictures

Frank Sennett The Spokesman-Review

As home broadband gathers steam and production tools grow cheaper and easier to operate, watch a growing number of bloggers say, “Let’s go to the video.”

Text blogging’s younger sibling, video blogging (or vlogging, if we must), has been making its mark for only about 18 months, and vlogs still number in the thousands.

But the industry is coming of age in QuickTime. The second Vloggercon unspooled in San Francisco last month. And surfers can access plenty of homegrown video — ranging from the artsy and entertaining to the political and technological — through directory sites such as FireAnt, Mefeedia, GetDemocracy.com and Vlogdir.

Vlog segments typically run less than 10 minutes, and viewers can stream them free on their computers with a mouse click, or download them to portable players such as the video iPod and PSP.

Some vlogs shoot in high definition and boast near-network TV quality, while others embrace the public-access aesthetic of shaky cameras and shakier hosts.

The current top vlog, Rocketboom, delivers a tech-tinged, ad-supported daily newscast to about 300,000 U.S. subscribers.

Host Amanda Congdon enhances the show’s appeal to the “Revenge of the Nerds” set. A cross between Liz Phair and Jenny McCarthy, Congdon’s known for her loopy delivery style and tight T-shirts. But she donned an earnest tone and a jean jacket for an interview with financier George Soros, who admitted, “I don’t have any online habits.”

Making a similar play for geek hearts, Microsoft tapped tech lovelies Tina Wood and Laura Foy to host The 10 Show at on10.net. And then there’s Amber Mac at commandN.tv.

But the universe of vlog topics keeps expanding right along with its potential audience. Politics junkies can Vent with Michelle Malkin at HotAir.com or catch the “Crossfire”-style punditry of Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus at BloggingHeads.tv, for instance.

Vlogging also lends itself to personal journal-style entries. Check out the urban video diary of Daniel Liss at PouringDown.tv for an artsy example of that form.

Viewers seeking windows to the Inland Northwest might visit The Spokesman-Review’s Video Journal, powered by photojournalist Colin Mulvany, or tune into the Dry Side Stories told by Spokane’s Doug Dobbins (who also produces a podcast for me).

Many traditional blogs are beginning to post videos, too. But instead of producing their own programming, they mainly turn to community video portals such as YouTube, Veoh and Google Video for content.

Posting snippets from those sites on a blog requires little more than cutting and pasting a bit of automatically generated code into a standard entry.

The process proved so simple it took me only about a minute last week to find a Warren Zevon performance on YouTube and post it to the Blogspotter blog. You can stream Zevon’s last rendition of “Mutineer” with one click on the resulting video box.

We’re all potential network programmers now.

Drilling down

Going beyond video posts, one director has created a blog to secure cash for his next feature-length film. Fixthemovie.blogspot.com so far has brought in about 10 percent of the $250,000 Tao Ruspoli needs.

Based on a true story about brothers, drugs, love and Los Angeles, “Fix” is scheduled to shoot in January. “I’m experimenting with a revolutionary way of financing film,” Ruspoli writes, “taking the power out of the big-shot executives and giving you the power to greenlight my film.”

Folks who pitch in as little as a buck will earn an associate producer credit. In addition, “I will repay the money you invested into a fund that will then be used to finance another film,” promises Ruspoli, who has several previous directing credits.

It might be worth a buck to be able to tell friends (and attractive strangers) you’re a film producer.