Web Documentaries Presentation

I just gave my presentation, "Exploring Convergence and the Web Documentary", at the Media Convergence Conference. The presentation, and those of others presenting, is available as a podcast at http://feeds.feedburner.com/convergence/.

There seemed to be interest in my presentation. An interesting comment/question was about my position that a Web documentary is the personal vision of the author. The questioner felt this went against the nature of the Web as a place where many should participate in authoring. My response was that while that approach, maybe through a wiki site, is one way to do this, that the Web allows many approaches including a personal Web documentary. I had one gentleman come up aftewards and tell me he agreed with my approach and the idea of carrying over some of the approaches from traditional video documentary.

The facilitating of individual voices via the Web and a variety of approaches is one of the powerful aspects of the Web. Anyone can publish and experiment with the communication form. I think its shortsighted to think in terms of only new Web-specific approaches. Every new technology is built on and draws from earlier ones. All are viable and possible on the Web. Bottomline is the Web site communicating effectively to its audience whatever way it does so.

The Website demonstrated as part of the presentation is "TowerReflections: A Web Documentary".