There’s no huge entry to filming a video comment, especially since so many people have Macs. I have a handy little iSight sitting there WAITING for me to make a video comment. I just don’t want to make people sit through it.

It takes ME longer to type a comment, but anyone else less time to read it. Why would I want to make their adoption of my theories, and my subsequent world domination, more difficult for them to access?

“1) Watching a video takes a lot longer than reading a short bit of text. There is much higher potential for noise, time-wasting, self-promotion, and spam among other things.”

Well you seem to have missed my point.

Right now there are less video comments than text comments. Video comments have a higher barrier to entry and hopefully if you cared enough to make a video and spent multiples of the time necessary to make several text posts.

“2) If you want to provide a detailed response, write a post and provide a trackback. Let me decide how whether I want to hear your long-winded opinion ”

Not everyone wants to
a) start a blog b)maintain a blog and c)provide a trackback
and people looking for answers might find it easier to click an inline video and see for themselves whether it’s worth it than follow a mystery link.

Besides some things are better presented visually (e.g., a visual walkthrough on solving a vexing computer error), some people are visual learners.

“3) Better rankings? I think the opposite is true. Because video is being used instead of text, the search engines have less content to crawl.”

Search engines are now looking at more assets on the page. Including relevant media like images and video and tagging them appropriately already improves search engine rankings.

I feel the exact same way. I think this post from Scrivs best sums it up: http://expertidiot.com/19/video-comments-blow-me/ I’m working on a post of my own…

@docgui
None of your stated “advantages” are merited.

1) Watching a video takes a lot longer than reading a short bit of text. There is much higher potential for noise, time-wasting, self-promotion, and spam among other things.

2) If you want to provide a detailed response, write a post and provide a trackback. Let me decide how whether I want to hear your long-winded opinion

3) Better rankings? I think the opposite is true. Because video is being used instead of text, the search engines have less content to crawl.

Just my two bits…

Cheers,
Aidan

Text is indexed by search engines. Video, not so much.