I read a lot of blogs. I like keeping up on what people are talking about — things people like, stuff that’s new, the issues. I’m also pretty busy during the day: email, meetings, actual work squeezed in between email and meetings. So, my blog reading goes a little like this:
Email, email, phone call, email… OK, need a break from email. Oh! Feeds! That looks interesting. I’ll just open that in another tab and get back to — phone! Right, email, (twitter), write this blog post, wait, wasn’t I doing something else? Oh feeds. Meeting now. Break during meeting as everyone’s getting dialed in. I’ll read a few more feeds. Hey, that seems interesting, and that too. I’ll just open these in tabs. Oh this one has a full feed. I can read it right here. Oh, meeting’s starting. I’ll mark that as new and come back to it.
Wow. Where did all these tabs come from?
By the end of the day, I have managed to get through all of my feeds in 30-second increments. Sometimes, I still have 50 tabs open at the end of the day, but hey, Bloglines doesn’t have any bolded items, mocking me, so I can at least feel like I’ve accomplished something. (And then I give up and close all my tabs and read SearchCap to find out what I’ve missed.)
Now, imagine throwing video into that mix. By the time I got the headphones on and the video downloaded, I’d be on to designing some new feature (or, more likely, answering more email). I’d only get to hear three words at a time, which just doesn’t seem very satisfying. I can sometimes have podcasts on the in the background, and those are easy to download and listen to at the gym. (I have a working shuffle! I can once again listen to things while I work out! And I can still do email at the same time.) But videos?
I realize this is my own personal shortcoming, my short attention span that accelerates my multitasking tendencies, but why can’t all videos come with transcripts, like closed captioning for those of us with attention deficits? (I realize also this wouldn’t work so well with videos of cute jumping cats.)
Am I the only one with this problem?