< !!rant!! >

CBS gets it, or at least, it does now. Wall Street Journal gets it. And so does the Associated Press.

What’s the matter with the rest of you?

They get that we want to embed news video . And we want it right now.

That’s right. I said embed. Not link.

Stop asking me, as a blogger, to link to your video. if I can’t embed your video, I don’t want it, and with CBS and the Associated Press on the bandwagon, I can either find what I need officially, or create video about the topic on my own.

You giving me a paltry link when I click on “share,” instead of the option for embed code is telling me how hopelessly Web 0.001 you are, by showing that you want me to step backwards in Internet time. Like I care about the oh-so-precious honor of helping you increase traffic to a site owned by your mega-conglomerate company. I don’t even get the good inner feeling of helping the little guy out, or telling my treasured audience something it doesn’t already know.

Nothing against big companies. I hope to be one someday. But when I do, I’ll have an AdWords or a Yahoo! Search Marketing account with a huge budget to match, for just such an occasion. If you don’t? Get one.

Then use it.

You may think my only beef is that linking to a non-spreadable video has nothing in it for me. But linking to the other bloggers that I occasionally choose to link to, (video or no), usually isn’t directly reciprocal either. But I know it will come back around to me one day, and I care that the blogosphere sees that I’m a good blogger. Even if it never comes back to me, I see some inherent benefit in being a good neighbor in my community.

I don’t care at all what kind of blogger most “official” national media outlets outside of the Associated Press thinks I am, because you wouldn’t lower yourselves to give my kind a leg up. And I could be wrong, but your policy of non-shareable video isn’t painting a different picture. It’s fitting squarely in the frame we all have in mind, that the big media companies are solely interested in bloggers for what they can do for you lot - not the community of bloggers as a whole, and so you don’t make tools we can use for two reasons.

1- Fear we’re going to take over your stories. (Duh. Put them in a context we can’t alter. Embeddable flash video is not rocket science.)

2- Reluctance to give credence to bloggers coupled with a simultaneous desire to use us as resources. You can’t dis us as citizen journalists (or journalists proper) and also work with us. Funny how that works.

You want to fix all that, big news? Give us video news, news stories that track back, and watch us spread your stories faster than you ever imagined while also building your brand name, and increasing interest in your online and offline shows.

You can always turn it off if you don’t like the results. < / rant >

[tags]online video, embedded video news, embed video news, video news, web video, web video news[/tags]