jonnygoldstein.com

Liz Gannes, a contributor to the blog NewTeeVee completely misrepresented facts in a headline about the Virginia Tech Massacre: “Virginia Tech Killer Vlogged Manifesto.” This headline is ridiculous. He sent a DVD and some papers to NBC via the United States postal service. How is that videoblogging? She clearly does not get what a vlog is, as she makes clear in her response to miffed commenters:

Speaking directly into your video camera about your innermost thoughts definitely says vlogging to me.

That’s like saying:

Turgid third person prose about tall dark handsome men sweeping plucky heroines off their feet says books to me.

Well…Yeah. A lot of people read romance novels, but that doesn’t mean that all books are romance novels. What Cho created is confessional video. That’s a genre. That stuff predates vlogging by decades, and furthermore has nothing to do with what a vlog is. Vlogging is content neutral, just like a book. It’s a medium. A video blog is a blog that links to video. Cho did not upload his video to the web, and he didn’t link to it from any blog of his. So Liz is just wrong.

I do understand that there is something new and weird about mass murder in the age of Web 2.0. Inevitably related media clips get propagated out on the web. But Cho didn’t have a videoblog. He wasn’t a vlogger. He didn’t post his videos on the web. He used the Al Qaeda technique and sent his stuff to a network and let them do the distribution.

As Chuck Olsen says: The vlog hook is the wrong hook.

I hope that Liz is wearing flipflops or sandals. Chewing on Doc Martins would not be fun.

P.S. Dave Winer, who ought to know better, needs to do a little foot chomping on this topic too.