Disruptive Conversations

Do you want a quick way to record and embed videos in your WordPress blog? Would you like to make it so that visitors to your blog could leave you video replies?

If so, Loic LeMeur and the Seesmic gang have come up with a rather cool option in the form of a WordPress plugin for Seesmic video. First announced yesterday on TechCrunch and then on Loic's blog, this plugin simply installs into your WordPress site and lets you both easily embed videos in your blog entries and also lets people leave video comments.

Given that I run this site on TypePad, I can't demonstrate the plugin here... but I built Voxeo's corporate blog portal using WordPress MU which does work with the video. You can see the plugin in action in this blog post in both the main post and also in the comments. (Please feel free to leave a comment as well! I'd love some more testers, especially "anonymous" testers without Seesmic accounts.)

CONTEXT MATTERS

One curious thing I did notice about using the plugin. If you have a Seesmic account, then the videos you create with the plugin also go out in your Seesmic feed. On one level, this is rather cool as it means that anyone following you in Seesmic will see the videos you create. However, when you are creating the videos you MUST remember:

Your video will be viewed in two different channels - with and without the context of the blog post.

For instance, here's the video I recorded this morning when I got the plugin working with the site:

Viewed within the context of the blog post, this video makes sense. However, just as a raw video in my Seesmic stream, the context isn't there. On what blog site was I testing out the plugin? Who is the "we" to which I was referring?

To make this make sense in both channels, I probably should have started off with something more like this:

Hi, this is Dan York and today I'm experimenting with adding the Seesmic video plugin for WordPress to our corporate blog site, blogs.voxeo.com, ...

Or something similar that clued people in to the blog site I was talking about.

Likewise when leaving a comment to a blog post, you will be commenting on the contents of the blog post. Someone seeing that within Seesmic will have no clue what you are talking about. Should you then start your post with something like this?

Hi, this is Dan York commenting on the blog post at <URL>:... blah, blah, blah...

Now here we have a problem. Without an intro like that ("commenting on the blog post at..."), the video comment makes perfect sense within the context of the blog post, but doesn't make sense in the Seesmic video stream. With an intro like that, the video seems a bit strange in the context of the blog post (you already know the URL of the site so why are you mentioning it), but does make sense in the Seesmic video stream.

Two different audiences viewing the same video with and without the context of the blog post.

SUGGESTION

Perhaps Seesmic needs to somehow add a field so that when a video is posted (either in the main post or as a reply) via the WordPress plugin there is a link in the Seesmic stream of the user back to the blog post where the video appears. Not sure how feasible that is, but perhaps it might address this issue.

In the meantime, users of the WP plugin should bear this dual audience factor in mind when you are recording videos.

If you do want to check out the Seesmic video plugin in action, you can visit the blog post I made earlier today and... seriously... feel free to leave a video comment if you have a camera. I'd love to get some more testing done of the plugin.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress mu, wpmu, seemic, video, plugins, voxeo