Why I love... Blogging (vs Vlogging)

Apologies for the WIL... delay this week, Blizzcon articles, gnomes and work got slightly in the way a bit 

I'm a fairly old school kind of person in some regards. I've always been someone who has preferred writing over talking, blogging over vlogging, considering my words carefully before committing them to "paper" so to speak.

I've been blogging for nearly 20 years now, starting in 1997 on various temporary websites for 4 years before deciding to purchase my first domain name, www.the-yarn.net, to host my wafflings online.

I've been blogging in one form or another on and off all those years, and since then, obviously vlogging (the video version of blogging in case you were wondering) came along and has somewhat supplanted it's parent form of personal thought divestment.

Yes, sure, I have a YouTube channel, but you've more than likely noticed that I'm way more likely to sit down and write a blog post on a subject rather than create a video.

Not only is this for the reasons highlighted above, that I'm a bit old school in that regard, but also because production of a video on the matter I want to talk about is a long-winded and time consuming process to get a video to the level of quality that I'm happy putting out there.

This involves recording of the audio, getting enough relevant video material to cover the subject at hand, and compositing all this material together in Adobe's Premiere Pro CC.

That can, and does in fact, take hours to put together even a 10 minute video, and leaves me precious little time to do much else on a day I decide to put a video together.

The other option is of course lowering the quality of the videos to a point where the audio's not edited and the video is hastily put together. I um and ahh quite a lot whilst gathering my thoughts on a subject when doing a voice-over, which is why I massively prefer writing to sitting in front of a mic and umming my way through a topic.

This has as much to do with my personality type as anything. Whilst I'm not by any means a shy person, I am definitely introverted, and other aspects of my personality in conjunction with that lead me to be the sort of person that prefers the written word over the oral.

I'm an IT educator and analyst by profession, and I have no problem standing in front of a bunch of people showing them how to do a certain thing, be it use a computer, programs like Word & Excel etc, so shyness is definitely not a thing I'm prone to these days, although I used to be when I was younger.

So that's why I prefer blogging over the more modern version. I may still do the odd video here and there, but looking at the average number of views my videos get I sometimes wonder if it's worth my while in all honesty.

Oddly enough, it's my guide videos that tend to get thousands of views, which lends more weight to the fact that me ending up educating people may in fact be the right job for me. With an increasing and developing interest in Psychology, it may not end up being IT related 100%, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Anyhoo, I just felt like writing something this morning, and this has been knocking around in my head for a while as something to say.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming ;)