Text vs. Video
Remember that post I wrote a few days ago about how video killed the radio star and publishing is next? Steve Rubel uncovers some valid reasons why text still rules in this Micro Persuasion blog post.
I can totally relate to Steve's first point about how text is scannable and video is not. I can't tell you how many short videos I didn't watch, simply because that initial frame that's frozen in the YouTube box didn't grab me. That's worse than judging a book by its cover, right?!
As much as I believe in the future Steve's post highlights some challenges that exist today. Some of these issues might get resolved down the road (e.g., SEO) while others could be trickier to address (e.g., the slacker perception at work).
From my 4 May 2008 post on PublishingMojo
[Marshall McLuhan predicted that video] would engage us in the life of the community. He was right that print often fails to do that, because it's one-way, top-down communication. Television wasn't the answer, though, because [it was] top-down too. What he was trying to invent was fully interactive media--something akin to Web 2.0. What he couldn't imagine was how successfully the new participatory media would integrate the core of the old media--text. Freed from the printed page, writing is no longer rigidly linear. It can flow seamlessly into pictures, sounds, or other text strands.
Posted by: PublishingMojo | January 24, 2009 at 12:41 PM