Voxmedia Wire

The community is diverse. There’s the soccer mom in Plano, Texas, who records her two children, ages 5 and 7, as they bake a bagel pizza, play softball and hang out with their grandfather. There’s a Peace Corps worker in Botswana who shows the daily life of people in the village of Nata. Hollywood actor-comedian Tom Green offers the TomGreen.com Channel, narrating, with his deadpan, irreverent humor, as he makes an appearance on the Carson Daly television show, hangs out with pal and skateboarder Tony Hawk and drives around Los Angeles.

Video bloggers claim spotlight

With the proliferation of devices like the video iPod, the vlog boom is on. As of March there were more than 6,500 vlogs, says directory Mefeedia.com, compared with fewer than 300 a year earlier. Apple’s (Research) iTunes store has offered vlogs for download as video podcasts since October, giving sites like Rocketboom a potential audience of 40 million iPod users.

Prime Time for Vlogs? (Business 2.0)

For this Generation@ video star, success is no longer about securing your own television show; it’s about making your own vlog a hit. Willing presenters are lining up. “We’re going to create a network of video bloggers on a range of topics,” Congdon says. She receives three to four e-mails per day, asking for jobs. “We want people in every big city, and even a few not-so-big ones. We’re not restricted like mainstream media. We do a different thing every day. Sometimes it’s news, sometimes it’s citizen journalism, sometimes it’s cultural commentary, sometimes it’s sketch comedy.”

Rise of the web video star (Sunday Times)

Video blogger Chuck Olsen has a storytelling sensibility that keeps fans coming back to his website for a daily dose. Chuck Olsen’s video blog points cameras at the far corners of Minnesota life.

In the past few months, Chuck Olsen’s website has shared stories about ice zombies, hairless cats, old buildings, female boxers, a man who competes with kids in beauty pageants, a collector of Kirby Puckett memorabilia and a cat that goes to college.

Minnesota’s stories served up (Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Initially, blogging opened up written journalism to anybody with a computer and an Internet connection. Then podcasting appeared, and every accountant or bartender who harbored dreams of hosting a radio show could do just that, and distribute it to the world. Now it is video’s turn to break away from its old masters, the television stations and Hollywood studios.

Vlogs make blogs so 2005 (Rutland Herald)

Having rendezvoused in St. Louis earlier that morning, Hall and Streeter have driven four and a half hours up Interstate 55 to co-headline Meet the Vloggers, the first major regional summit on the burgeoning art of video blogging. Also known as “vlogging” or “video podcasting,” the discipline is akin to a standard blog, except with an audiovisual content focus, and is to traditional podcasting (i.e., audio-only webcasts that can be downloaded onto iPods and various other multimedia platforms) as moving pictures are to radio.

Sweet and Lo-Fi (Riverfront Times)

Phil Burns doesn’t sweat his geek status. The local entrepreneur, who wrote his first software program at age 12, credits a nerd-like love of technology as the driving force behind his latest business venture, a cutting-edge company that plans to use video blogging, or vlogging, as a unique marketing tool for dot-com corporations… Vlogs are like blogs, with visual shorts replacing text to catalog everything from daily political musings to the ins and outs of vodka-based stew.

Virtual Renegades (Salt Lake City Weekly)

When Chuck Olsen left his Web-producer day job at a local TV station in late 2004, he aimed to popularize the video-blogging medium that had consumed him for years…But above all, Olsen aspires to make vlogging pay for itself. He’s in search of the proverbial “business model” that will make his indie-style medium a financially thriving concern. “I want to devote all my time to this,” he says, “going out and getting interviews and telling stories.”

Chuck Olsen: video blogmeister (Pioneer Press)

As I scroll through all the choices and listen to more of them than is probably healthy, I’m increasingly confused about what this medium of podcasting really is. An outlet for new talent? An outlet for the painfully untalented? A real threat to traditional broadcasting? A promotional tool for mega-corporations? The biggest waste of bandwidth yet created? Probably all of the above. What it isn’t, at least not yet, is much of a business.

The Year of the Podcast (Slate)

A few years ago, anyone with a new concept in video content would have faced huge hurdles obtaining mass distribution. They would have had to spend millions to develop a new network and even then might not have sold it to satellite and cable operators, whose channel lineups are getting saturated. Today, essentially all someone like Ms. Agnew needs to make a so-called video Web log, or vlog, is a digital camera that can capture moving images and high-speed Internet access.

Vlogger (noun): Blogger With Video Camera