It’s been said that blogging is dead, which is a shame, although I’ll continue to do my part to keep it alive. But one thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of people who used to be prolific bloggers are now channeling their energy into vlogs instead.

I’ve changed my mind before, so who knows if I will at some point in the future, but right now I feel pretty comfortable saying that I won’t be one of those bloggers-turned-vloggers, for a lot of reasons. The first is that, as I said in this post, I blog because I love to write. And vlogging is not writing. It’s talking to a camera, which doesn’t come naturally to me at all. I have a much harder time articulating what I want to say when I’m talking rather than writing. The few times I have vlogged were for Snark Squad’s Segue Magic, and I feel like what came out in those vlogs would have been much more articulate if I’d written it down instead.

Also, vlogging means that you have to look at yourself. A lot. I forget that there are people who actually like looking at themselves, because I hate it. But I guess it makes sense—I mean, look at people who vlog regularly. Literally ALL of them are attractive. Looks don’t matter quite so much in blogging.

It’s a shame, too, because while there are a lot of now-vloggers whose blogs I loved, that love has not transferred to their vlogs. And it’s not that their vlogs aren’t good or entertaining. It’s that I wish I was getting the same information in blog format. I read very quickly, for one thing, but YouTube videos have a set time, and I know that reading whatever the vlogger has to say would be quicker for me. And usually, if the vlogger is someone who’s regularly blogged in the past, there’s nothing that comes across in a vlog that wouldn’t in a blog post. I’ve never seen a vlog by a former blogger and been surprised by it or thought that they seemed different speaking than they do in writing—I find that most good bloggers are pretty good at writing how they speak. Consequently, I very rarely watch vlogs, even by bloggers I really love.

This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the occasional vlog. But I think in order to choose to vlog something rather than blog, it has to contain some kind of content that doesn’t come across in writing. Like it involves singing or music, or a point of the vlog is pronouncing something or using a particular accent.

The other thing that can make a vlog worthwhile to me is a vlog that shows us something other than the vlogger’s face. Good example: I love the vlogs that different actors do and have done for Broadway.com—they show us interactions with other people and what things are like behind the scenes of different shows. (I’m particularly fond of these ones.)

The Internet is changing, and not always, in my opinion, for the better. I think it’s great that people find community in vlogging the way we used to at Twenty-Something Bloggers, but it’s not for me, and I wish blogging didn’t seem so dead.

I guess blogging joins the radio star in the list of video’s victims.