I get a few hundred links a week in my RSS aggregator, and guess which ones I get the least out of? The ones that send me to a page with a two-line teaser and embedded video of a talking head. Maybe I’m just a total text junkie, but I can scan a three-page article, pounce on the two sentences that interest me, and decide whether it’s worth saving to Zotero in about 90 seconds. In that amount of time, the video announcer has introduced the topic and the speaker has cleared his throat.
What’s the point of a talking-head video in a technical field? If the person’s insights are important, I’ll want them in written form so I can quote them. I don’t care what they look or sound like, and if they’re referring to data I want the tables and charts in front of me now — not some ‘here’s an idea, now you have to go look it up because we can’t even be bothered to post a link to the paper’ time waster.
Basically, these videos take a half page of material (if that) and make a big deal out of the fact that a person is saying it out loud. Great for someone who learns through listening and is interested in the Cliff’s Notes version, I suppose — but how many of those people are viewing technical blogs?
Ironically enough, the major talking-head source in my current set of feeds is a blog about good social media practices in higher education. They are two useless links away from being purged.
