A new kind of Vlog | Chasing Windmills

What is it about Minnesota in the U.S.? Is this state the innovation capital for video weblogs? Heaven knows there's enough of them.

Minnesota Stories | Secret Vlog Injection | Green, Green Water
Super Adventures TV | DigElogROCORI | jadelr's notebook
My Stories of Life | Starfire TV

A few thoughts on what I find so great about this. For the last ten or fifteen years we've been told, usually by marketing types and venture capitalists, that the internet is a global phenomenon, that a tiny shop in a small town can suddenly get access to customers around the world. Suddenly you have the ability to realise communities based on common interests rather than geography.

Fact is, we are kind of tied to our geography. It goes with being physical entities. So I find it wonderful that there has been a reminder in the last year or so that the internet is also a great way of communicating and sharing common content in smaller, geographically based communities. That's what I find so interesting about this scene. The people involved are happy to promote and assist each other, creating content that is of specific interest to a core community, with the added advantage of also being available to the rest of us.

On her personal weblog Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom fame made some comments regarding the state of vlogs, in particular personal vlogs. In her opinion (and I have to say I kind of agree) the sort of content we tend to see now ("A lot of the video blogs out there are by someone in their bedroom, half-awake.") will not be very palatable to a mainstream audience.

In other words, the majority of video weblogs (a genre still in its infancy with a HUGE potential) are just people making content for other vloggers. That's why it's nice to see something different.

Chasing Windmills is a semi-daily guerilla style series of short pieces, kind of half drama, half reality show, about a young urban couple that's starting to push what the genre can achieve. I have to say from the outset the stories don't really appeal to me but I find it enthralling to see the genre develop in this way. More power to jadelr and Christina Cordova for trying something beyond the norm.