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April 23, 2008

New: Video Comments On All TechCrunch Blogs

Michael Arrington

223 comments »

We’ve been testing a new comments feature on the TechCrunch blogs over the last few days - video comments, powered by Seesmic (a company I invested in). The feature is delivered via a Wordpress plugin (details here and an overview video is here).

You’ll see the link to leave a video comment at the end of the comment stream on every post. You can choose to leave a text comment or a video comment. You’ll need to create a Seesmic account to start leaving comments, and that account will allow you full access to Seesmic as well as any other blogs that begin to use the plugin.

The plugin also integrates directly into the Wordpress admin page, allowing bloggers to create a video and embed it into their post directly.

Seesmic is not the first video startup to do this. Viddler released an excellent plugin earlier this year as well. Details on the Viddler product are here, which includes a list of blogs that have integrated it. If you are thinking of adding this feature to your blog, you should look at both products and choose the one that’s right for you.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Michael Arrington

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:49 am

     

  2. MrCashyCash

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:52 am

    Shameless plug for Seesmic.

  3. Michael Arrington

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:54 am

    MyCashyCash - say it in video.

  4. wayne sutton

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:55 am

    More TechCrunch comments and the future of blogs 

  5. Dracula....the VC

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:55 am

    great for porn, not so good for anything else

  6. Christopher Finke

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 am

    Does this have any advantage over text comments, except for taking longer to “read” or being more bandwidth-intensive? I suppose it does have the advantage of boosting Seesmic signups over the next few days…

  7. Joi Ito

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 am

    gratz 

  8. Chris

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 am

    I’m not sure I like this idea. I know I am probably just a naysayer, but I am not really fond of video comments. People are sometimes more articulate in writing than in a verbal format. It is a rare day that I would even bother to click on a video comment; easier to read, or at least skim.

  9. Aaron Choi

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 am

    @Michael Arrington Boo. I say no to video commenting.. i can read faster than people can speak… saves me no time whatsoever.

  10. Jim Kukral

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 am

    Testing for Mike. 

  11. YDrive

    April 23rd, 2008 at 10:59 am

    Plugin to Wordpress, the way to go.. the right choice! :P

  12. Bwana

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:00 am

    TC + Seesmic = Good thing 

  13. Michael Arrington

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:01 am

     

  14. vidiot

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:01 am

    If we were to update the movie “The Graduate”, the word whispered to today’s version of Dustin Hoffman’s character would be: “video”.

    This video comment feature is a guaranteed hit!

  15. Cathy Brooks

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:01 am

    Game on! 

  16. Eddie LeBreton

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:02 am

    Say goodbye to any search engine traffic from indexed comment text.

  17. Shunjie

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:02 am

    Video comment cool 

  18. Loic

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:03 am

    congrats for the video comments on TechCrunch! 

  19. Jeradc

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:03 am

    Not something I’m going to view/use at work. oh well.

  20. Vinvin

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:04 am

    Faster for the one who comments 

  21. Christopher Finke

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:04 am

    Michael, your last video demonstrated why video comments won’t take off - would you read my comment if it BARK BARK was BARK written like BARK BARK BARK this? BARK I don’t BARK BARK think you BARK would.

  22. Brij

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:04 am

    I think this is a best way to beat comment spammers! 

  23. Loic

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:05 am

    @joi the MT plugin is coming too 

  24. Afraid of the Dark

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:05 am

    thanks Mike, I used to always read the comments. Now that I think about it further, this finally provides the impetus to do nothing more than simply go the RSS route and not bother to visit the comments site or much anything else anymore.

    thanks bro…. i wouldn’t be suprised if you saw the number of page views go down drastically because of this.

  25. David Oxley

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:05 am

    Suggestion for Seesmic … aquire voice recognition firm and automagically provide transcript for all videos so we don’t have to watch every single one to see what people said.

    It’s an interesting featre and I might watch a few but after the first few I’d rather just read their comments.

  26. browse

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:05 am

    joi and michael video battling? greenburg would be proud.

  27. YDrive

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:06 am

    While the TC people are here.. TC seems to have changed backend servers or whatever.. the contents have been “out-of-sync” often enough, these few days. Have been fans of TC for long enough to tell the ux difference, notwithstanding that it could be subtle.

    Other than the # of comments often seen out of sync (eg., see say 12 comments this minute, then back to 2 comments the next minute)..

    Worst, sometimes a post seems never seen, but suddenly pops up with 30 or 50 comments already..

    Obviously not TC to blame.. likely the hosting provider or whatsoever… fyi.

  28. Et

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:07 am

    I agree with Chris.
    Without a written preview or even having the time length of the video, I don’t know whether it’s worth watching or not.
    Not very practical for skimming.
    It’s just more unstructured information.

  29. Adam Jackson

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:08 am

    Sweet. The baseball cap is interesting being that you’re most likely indoors. Never thought I’d see Mike rocking a baseball cap.

  30. Ryan

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:09 am

    I like Video 

  31. Neville Hobson

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:10 am

    Added value 

  32. Peteski

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:10 am

    I like the thinking behind it, however I’m not too sure of its impact. I get too easily distracted and start wondering about things like “why is he wearing a hat”?

    I’m with Afraid of the Dark on this.

  33. Christopher Finke

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 am

    Although Ryan has demonstrated that this will allow dogs to participate more fully in the discussion. I am back on the fence.

  34. Michael Arrington

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:12 am

     

  35. Craig Mische

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:14 am

    a good idea 

  36. Joi Ito

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:14 am

    Michael, you never call, you never write… ;-)

    See you in Menorca.

  37. Loic

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:15 am

    thanks Neville! 

  38. David Jacobs

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:16 am

    Coolness 

  39. Minic

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:16 am

    Testing… 

  40. Morgan

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:17 am

    My God… It’s… Beautiful…

    Nah, not really. It just ejects me from the conversation altogether. No way am I unblocking Flash on this site just to take even longer to read through comments. Bye-bye skimming.

  41. David

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:18 am

    Honestly this is overkill. I have no interest in taking the time to watch and listen to people’s responses. Quick one or two sentence responses make interesting discussions. 30 to 60 second videos discussing TC posts are not worth my time.

  42. Morgan

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:18 am

    Curious, if this is in any way better for comments, then why not the same for the main article itself? Live it to the limit!

  43. Benjamin Gauthey

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:22 am

    Great feature! But now, we’ll need a transcript for each video comment in order to index the comments, read them quickly…. My 2 cents ;)

  44. Faramarz Hashemi

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:22 am

    hahahah this is pretty cool!

    It’s nice to put a face to some of the regulars and get a sense of the nerdiness of the techcrunch demographics.

    nice move, seesmic should add a transcript functionality!

  45. Nick O'Neill

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:25 am

    Congrats to Seesmic 

  46. Julien

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:27 am

    Congrats! Real conversation… 

  47. Erick Schonfeld

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:29 am

    I love the video comments. Helps to put a face and personality to each reader. But I wonder if video and text comments will play well together. It is also a huge time-suck to watch all of these. Was hard enough before just to read everything. (As you can see, I prefer text).

    Hopefully, some new personalities will emerge and people will gravitate towards watching those commenters. Maybe this will help the best commenters stand out and really be on a par with the original post in terms of share of voice.

    Is Loren Feldman going to start critiquing every post in a video comment now? God help us.

  48. Arthur Madrid

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Congrats this is cool! 

  49. Nick O'Neill

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:34 am

    @Erick totally agree … I think people will have a preference for one or the other though and now you can do both … It would be nice if you could include a text summary with each video comment and not just limit it to video

    Yes, God help us if Loren Feldman starts commenting on everything … that would be a great promotional tool for him though … I cant watch every video comment though

  50. G

    April 23rd, 2008 at 11:34 am

    Good experiment - but for this be of value - you really need this implemented in closed communities - or else - the