NETSPEAK
The promise of live video blogging
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Netizens can communicate with their audience more effectively using video, a lively medium
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The explosion of vlogs naturally creates a demand for search tools to locate the right ones.
NETSPEAK EXPLORES the world of vlogs and profiles certain means for creating your own vlog.
Netizens are familiar with personal publishing tools such as blogs and podcasts. Yet another publishing medium fast becoming popular is vlog or video blog. A blog whose main content is video is known as vlog or video blog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlog). Another term gaining currency in the vlog arena is vodcasting or video podcasting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_podcast), which is the process of distributing video content with web feeds.
Unlike text-only blogs, video blogs present immense opportunities for netizens to communicate with their audience more effectively.
In the past, this column had discussed several video-hosting services (like YouTube), meant for helping netizens host video content generated by them and share it with the world. Most of these services facilitate users posting videos stored on them to their blog.
The availability of such free video hosting services coupled with the appearance of simple video generation gadgets (such as video enabled mobile phone and webcam) have made this technology popular.
Currently the vlogosphere is filled with tens of hundreds of vlogs on a variety of subjects. For instance, the vlog `TILT' (http://tilttv.blogspot.com/), meant for teachers, regularly posts valuable video content useful for the teaching fraternity.
This explosion of vlogs naturally creates a demand for search tools to locate the right ones.
The Vlog directory VlogDir (http://vlogdir.com/) is an excellent resource for this purpose. This search service lets you spot vlogs filed under different categories that include education, family, health and software.
A visit to the vlog directory Mefeedia (http://mefeedia.com) may fetch you rich vlog dividends. Freevlog (http://freevlog.org/) is another resource with lots of vlog related stuff.
Yet another vlog tool worth a mention is Vlogmap (http://community.vlogmap.org/) which attempts to provide a geographical distribution of vlogs currently available worldwide — a good resource for identifying country specific vlogs. This author could locate an India specific vlog with this service (http://csfvlog.blogspot.com/).
The essential requirement to start a vlog is the facility to generate video.
To generate video content one needs video capturing devices (such as webcam) and video composing programs (such as the Windows Movie Maker). In case you do not intend to install/use a video generation program to compose video content and still are keen to build some video stuff for sharing with friends/clients, on-line video recording services like `Stars of the Web' come handy.
Regular readers of this column will recall the piece on live podcasting applications, profiled a few weeks ago (http://www.hindu.com/2006/05/15/stories/200605150020 1600.htm). Such services allow you to record/store/share audio content directly from the browser.
In fact, services like `Stars of the Web' (http://stars-of-the-web.net/) can be considered an extension of a live podcasting service. Here, besides audio, you can record/publish your video content from your browser. There is no need to install a video composing software; the service helps you eliminate the software based video composing step from the vlog-posting loop. Hence, to produce/publish video, you only need a webcam and a microphone.
Signing-up with 'Stars of the web' will yield you a vlog, where you can post your video. Also, if you want your new creation to appear on your own blog, the service will provide you the required HTML codes to embed on to it.
A similar vlog creation service tested by this author is BlogCheese (http://www.blogcheese.com/). This also enables you to record video directly from your browser. It provides a fully manageable vlog (with URL of the form: http://www.blogcheese.com/your-suggested-name).
Yet another video publishing service that lets you shoot video directly from your browser is the free VideoEgg (http://www.videoegg.com). Its distinct advantage lies in its facility for uploading one's video content on to popular blogging services like Blogger.
Popular programs such as browser, mail client and office suite depend on many other software modules and hence cannot be transported from one machine to another.
Portable directory
Unlike such programs, as discussed in the past (http://www.hindu.com/biz/2005/01/10/stories/2005011000251500. htm), a portable application can be moved from one machine to another with ease.
A portable application generally keeps all the required modules under a single folder and can be stored on a portable device like the thumb drive. We have come across several such applications in the past (such as the Portable Firefox).
In this regard, you may check out the portable applications directory `PortableApp' (http://portableapps.com/) which hosts several such products. Here, you will find links to programs such as Portable GIMP (a graphics software), Portable NVU (a web authoring tool) and Portable VLC media player.
Safe search
Web navigation, though a pleasant and fruitful experience, can turn out to be dangerous at times. There are many virus/spyware carrying web sites that can destabilise your machine/browser by injecting harmful materials.
A service that can scan a web site for harmful content and inform you on the nature of its content will make web navigation safer.
Scandoo (http://www.scandoo.com/) is an application that allows you to invoke a search with a search service of your choice (currently supports Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask), scans all the links in the output in real-time for offensive content and displays an icon alongside. A green tick icon means the site is safe while a red icon implies the site to be a danger spot.
J. MURALI
He can be contacted at: jmurali@gmail.com
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