Sometimes things get better

[andrewducker]

I'd like to thank the BBC for putting the word "VIDEO" at the start of the headlines for all of the stories on their site which are predominantly videos*.

It makes it significantly easier to avoid opening pages which I either can't watch at work, or have no real interest in looking at at home.**

*On the RSS feed, that is. They use a little play button image on the site itself.

**I don't enjoy watching a talking head take five times as long to explain something than it would take me to read it myself. I'm not four, I can read for myself. The only time I'm interested in video news is when the image/footage itself is part of the news - i.e. rarely.

Comments

[pseudomonas]

Yes, exactly this. I hope the apparent trend towards videos in places where there used to be text when bandwidth/technology mandated it is not a long-term one.

[andrewhickey.info]

Unfortunately, I doubt it. The percentage of people who read by choice - at all - is a very small one. People in general prefer to listen rather than read, and to watch rather than listen, and as both the population online becomes ever more representative of the general population, and as technology improves to the point where creating video content becomes trivially easy, I think we can expect to see huge swathes of the web become text-free zones. Maybe by then the spambots will have dropped off Usenet and those of us who prefer text can go back there?

(NB, I am *NOT* here saying that people who prefer one mode of communication to another are better or worse. The above could look like "oh, those chavs/plebs taking over our space and using it for *shudder* video". It's not. Just a statement of preference, not a value judgement).