The Beet: Seesmic Video Comments This week on Beet.TV, Cathy Brooks gives Andy Plesser the scoop on Seesmic, a video comment platform that's recently been adopted by Wordpress and MyBlogLog, and will soon be available for TypePad and MovableType.
Cathy makes the great point that video brings out something more personal from online communication: "It's a very qualitative shift," she says. "By putting a face -- a literal face -- to communication, it humanizes it."
That's my favorite aspect of the service, as well. Discovering a blogger you've been reading for a while has -- gasp -- an accent! is a bit of a revelation.
Of course, that doesn't mean that it will take off as a comment tool. In addition to the scanability issue raised on Read/Write/Web, my biggest peeve is that it creates an imbalance of authority in comment threads. Text boxes often only allow for relatively short commentary, but Seesmic video comments don't. At the moment, it's also an exclusive service, available only by invite.
In the case of, for example, this thread on TechCrunch, the one person who happens to have a Seesmic invite dominates visually by being the only video, and is also allowed significantly more room to voice his opinion.
Still, as the Online Journalism Blog notes, Seesmic is interesting because it "is to YouTube what Twitter is to blogging." Because it's framed as a commenting service, it allows parties on both sides of the screen to feel comfortable knowing that what they say isn't that important. It's valuable precisely because it's so disposable. And that's where the fun begins.
