Venture Geek

I have spent a fair amount of time in the last year or so hanging out on YouTube, IFILM, Google Video and the host of other video sharing sites that have also recently emerged. I have also done some amateur video of my own with iMovie (a very fun thing to do — and something I used to think I would never have interest in). So, it’s safe to say I’m a fan of the new wave of amateur video — and let me be honest here: I’m a TV junkie. I manage to limit the amount of time I spend actually watching TV/online video, but I could, left to my own devices, flip channels (or whatever the online equivalent of channels are — more on that some other time, perhaps) all day long.

But, I don’t find video a particularly good format for non-entertainment information. In other words, unless it’s something that is making me laugh or cry or some other explicitly leisurely emotion I don’t generally find myself making the time to watch. The latest example was a video of Kara Nortman talking about, of all things, the online video space. Now, this is a topic that I’m very interested in, and hearing from an experienced venture investor on the space is definitely right up my alley. But, sitting through a video of her talking about it is ever so tedious. First of all, you need to be in a place where having sound on is OK — in many work places that’s often not acceptable (or, in my case, catching up on various blogs and such while my wife is watching TV next to me). Sure, I could wear headphones, but when I’m doing that I generally have music on (and I’d have to stop the music to watch the video). More importantly, you can’t really skim video — I read far too many blogs to actually read every word of every article. Skimming is a must to gain cursory knowledge of lots of things and decide which few things are worth taking the time to digest fully. It might even help if there were any easy way to just plain play the video faster — people talking is a laborious way to pass along information, and only works when the speaker is very engaging in my experience (and this from someone who loves a good lecture over reading for picking something up — but, the in-person aspect of that also matters). There’s also the problem that videos like the one above tend to be very disparate — in other words, although it’s technically possible to have, for instance, an RSS feed of videos, few people serving up video of this nature are using feeds — instead they want you to click into the site (partially for the ad impressions and partially out of technical limits/vision).

I don’t have the same opinion of audio. For instance, I’m a huge fan of Doug Kaye’s fantastic service IT Conversations, but I listen to that in the car on my iPod (watching video while driving is still a no-no — but, for how long?).

Anyone found video to be a good way to get non-entertainment information? If so, where are you finding it and when are you watching it?