UPDATE: Lileks says this:

In a sense, blogging is so 2004. The next big thing will be videoblogs. You can fit a rudimentary TV studio in a suitcase -- a laptop, a camcorder, a few cables, and a nearby Starbucks with Wi-Fi you can leech onto to upload your reports. This too will be good. One hundred thousand pairs of eyes looking high and low, versus CBS' staring monocular orb. We'll all turn to the nets to see what they think we should think. And then we'll hit the blogs for the rest of the story.

Hmm. I keep hearing the big guys confidently predicting the rise of the videoblog; but I'm not so sure, frankly. Looking at it from a user-interface standpoint, what's the benefit of video over text? You get pictures and sound and a much richer view of what you're looking at. But what are the intractable downsides? You have to direct and edit video, for one—a badly edited video is way harder to watch than a clunky, confused essay like mine above. Text is just naturally much easier to digest, too, than even the best-edited video. If your mind wanders and you miss a sentence of what someone says in video, it's a pain to go grab the scroll knob and roll it back an indeterminate few seconds to listen to it again, and that's not counting rebuffering and video codecs and all that rot. In text, all you have to do is flick your eye back to the previous line.

And more importantly, when it's text, you can visit a blog and within two seconds know whether there are new posts or not, and within five seconds know whether the new posts are worth reading. You can skim a headline instantly. What's the equivalent ease you get with video? Um, none. You have to watch the thing in order to see what it's about, how long it will take to see it, whether it contains any information you'll find useful, and so on. How many TV news reports have you watched where you got to the end and the reporter said, "Back to you, Diane," without covering anything you were actually hoping to see? You've wasted five minutes. If it were a text blog, it would have taken you a sip and a half of Diet Coke and a stroke of the scrollwheel to process the same information. Not to mention that it probably took the author 1/1000th of the time and effort to produce it. Whence the vaunted immediacy of blog debate once it's all video? How long would it have taken a bunch of videobloggers to break the Rathergate story? A long bloody time, and much fewer people would have had the patience to pay attention to it, let alone do the actual work. Video can't achieve critical mass the way text can and has, in everything from the explosion of e-mail and the Web on forward. Text is the low-tech, low-barrier-to-entry equivalent of papyrus in the CD-ROM age: unsexy, but it'll always work, even after the power grid fails and we're all eating each other in the desert.

Besides, how are you supposed to quote a videoblog? Let's see anyone deny that quoting and cross-linking and fisking is the very heart and soul of blogging. How is that even possible with video? Think how many fiskings there would be of Fahrenheit 9/11 if it'd been text; the only big one we have is the result of one man's obsessive job at deconstructing and transcribing the points of the video into a much more malleable medium, text. Maybe I'm stubbornly refusing to be visionary enough to imagine the stream-of-consciousness, effortlessly editable VR World of Tomorrow, but video and text haven't materially changed in decades, as far as their consumption goes; I can't see that changing anytime soon. Meanwhile, text remains far more flexible and can be molded to the whims of anyone, reader or writer, hence the equalizing nature of the blog where there's essentially no disconnect between the blogger and the discourse in his comments. Once the blogger becomes a director, his readers and fellow bloggers can't respond in kind anymore. And the whole essence of blogging's collaborative nature is lost.

And let's not even get into trying to do a Google search on something someone said in a videoblog. I'll leave that as an exercise for the, um, reader.

I'm skeptical, in short, of the claims so commonly issued by Glenn and the like that videoblogging will inevitably take the place of text blogging, that it will open up huge new realms of discourse and so on. I'm sorry, but looking at it from the standpoint of an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the medium itself, I just don't see it. It's like how I can't quite see an iTunes for movies; the medium isn't as much of a slam-dunk. It takes a lot more shoehorning to make it fit. The discrete pieces of media aren't in such perfect, bite-sized chunks, and lack the natural, built-in organizing criteria we've come to know and love. There are benefits, but they only qualify it as an adjunct to the real steamroller of a medium that we already have, not as a new medium in itself.

We'll undoubtedly see more people posting videos, often very good ones, to support their existing text columns and blogs. But can you seriously, honestly, picture going to a blog on a daily basis whose only content was a QuickTime/WMV window that you had to click Play on to see what it had to show you today?