I watched Robert Scoble interviewing Steve Gillmor about Attention.xml (video available at Ourmedia). I watched it during my workday, one of the few times that I have openly available for this kind of media consumption. I’ve been following Attention.xml for a while in subscriptions and tags and haven’t had time to thoroughly read through my collection yet, but it’s high on my list of concepts to understand.

The content was educational, and I felt important as well. Robert and Steve talked in enough detail to give a background and some applications for it. Enough detail to raise the urgency level of my reading the materials I’ve collected, and enough to mean that I need to go back and listen to the interview again.

Which brings me to my complaint: why video? I’m probably going to want to consume this piece of audio several times over the next few days, and right now I can only do so while sitting at my laptop, and that’s frustrating. There is nothing, nothing, compelling about the visual aspect of the media - all of the good stuff is in the audio. The video is a couple of talking heads, and since I know what both Steve Gillmor and Robert Scoble look like I can fill in that part for myself (and it’s funnier in my head anyway).

Don’t get me wrong, I like video when there’s something, um, visual to be interested in. But I don’t particularly need to see someone speaking to get what they’re saying unless the visual is part of the package.

Of course, I know what the solution is, and have already ripped the audio so that I can listen again on my commute tonight. If Robert had licensed his video (or if he gives me permission), I could post it to OurMedia as well.

By the way, I thought this was the most visually interesting part of Scoble’s video:

In fact, in that shot, Steve Gillmor looks a little bit like my dad. Sorry, Steve.