Video blogging: content to the max

The lure of video blogging combines the ubiquitous, grassroots, Web-based journaling of blogging with the richness of expression available in multimedia. Some claim that video blogging is an important force in a future world of video journalism and a powerful technical adjunct to our existing televised news sources. Others point to the huge demands it imposes on networking resources, the lack of hard standards, and the poor usability of current video blogging systems as indicators that it's doomed to fail. Like any nascent technology, video blogging has many unsolved problems. The field, however, is vibrant, the goals are fairly clear, and the challenges they pose to multimedia researchers are exciting indeed. Developing the standards and technologies for video blogging requires a combination of approaches from various areas including media representation, information retrieval, multimedia content analysis, and video summarization. Like the development of the Web and text blogging before, video blogging only come about through open development and collaboration between engineers and researchers from diverse fields. Most strikingly, it is fueled by the passion and enthusiasm of those creating content - those who go to the trouble of recording their lives and opinions within the fledgling medium, shaping it as a lively and useful resource for generations of Internet users to come.