Kristen Taylor and options for videoblogging

Kristen Taylor, the online community manager for the Knight Foundation, is a seasoned videoblogger with a focus on foodblogging. (Here she is, telling you what to do with scallops, mangos and bacon.) As such, she’s a great person to give the room full of journalists an intro to what tey might do with hosting and sharing video online.

YouTube is a must, says Kristen, if only because it’s got huge mindshare and audience… but it’s probably the least friendly and appealing for the video authors. For serious, serial videobloggers, she prefers blip.tv, which allows people to create shows with a consistent intro, outro, logo and branding, encouraging creators to make a commitment to producing series, not just individual posts. Kristen uses Vimeo, a tool designed to let people share HD video and believes it has the best picture quality, but she’s intrigued by Viddler, which allows comments on specific moments within a video. (While cool, she points out that this can be a moderation challenge.)

Kristen tells us that, today, she’s vlogging using Flickr. While Flickr allows you to post very quickly, it has size limits that limit the length of your video, making the clips more like “a long photo” than a traditional video segment. With this many places to post, Kristen recommends Tube Mogul, a free service that allows you to upload a video once and publish it on multiple platforms.

She offers a useful set of tips for incorporating video in blogposts (some of which I’m bad about following):

– Contextualize video as you would a blockquote
– Indicate the file size and format of the video
– Link to HD versions of the video – they’re usually too bit to incorporate them online
– Explain the player functionality to your readers
– Plan for comment moderation, as you’re going to need to moderate.

The discussion afterwards raises the issue of subtitling, where Kristen recommends dot.sub, which allows you not just to publish videos with subtitles, but let anyone add subtitles in their language to your video. Seesmic also comes up as a suggestion for quick and easy videoblogging, pointing out that Seesmic allows video recording through a flash application, rather than a standalone application.

As I was putting these notes together, I came across a post from Afrigadget, telling me that they’ve moved their hosted video to Zoopy, a social media site based in South Africa. Worth checking out as well…