What to Video?

writer: russell j.t. dyer; posted: February 2, 2008; revised: February 2, 2008; readers in past month: 840

Last year I purchased a digital based video camera, a JVC Everio (GZMG555). It’s a nice camera: it takes 5 mega-pixel images in a wide-screen format and has a 30 gigabyte, internal hard disk drive. When I first bought it, I made a video of my daughter, Marie shopping.

I bought the video camera primarily because I want to create videos for my web site. However, I’m really at a loss as to what to video record. I have some vague notions, but really need to be clear what I want to do. I’ve seen the silly videos on public sites: I don’t want to do that. I’ve also seen video web logs. As a writer, I feel that I should write my web log entries. I could occasionally do a video to accompany a web log entry. I’m not sure how well that would play, though. On sites like the nytimes.com I see short videos in which people are interviewed related to a public event like a political campaign. Something like that might be interesting, but I would need others to cooperate with this style. Since spend much of my time in Italy, there might be a language problem with this approach.

So, I’m looking for suggestions and ideas on what kind of videos I might create for my site that would be interesting for me and visitors. One of these ideas I mentioned above may work for me, but I first need to understand the value of them and how I might approach the idea.