I like Bloggingheads.tv, a wonky thing where two opinion-type people talk about a certain list of topics over the phone while each is recorded on a webcam.
Things I like about it:
- the deliberate low-tech, no-style style, where people are ugly but it's ok
- the deliberate boringness of the entertainment, where people can take their time and talk about geeky topics
- the dialectic approach, where people of generally opposing viewpoints discuss in a supportive way without getting into fights
- the smart interface, featuring nice ways to link to a particular segment (yeah multimedia is one area where Flash really is irreplaceable so far)
I was thinking it might be a nice thing to do on cognoshanty. Two people agree beforehand on some list of topics, chat for a while, and voilą! a blog post, interesting to at least 3 or 4 other people.
As far as I can tell the bloggingheads.tv technology isn't available for anyone else's use, but we might be able to cobble something together.
Posted by Kai Carver at December 4, 2008 06:12 PMYou could edit together screencaps of vchat.
Silverback (mac only) could maybe be hacked to do something like this and it only costs $50. It does a simultaneous screencap and video of the person in front of the computer.
I like the idea. Let's figure out how to do it. Doesn't even have to be things we disagree about. Does have to be stuff we actually know something about.