What's a "Vlog"?

First of all, what exactly is a “vlog”? The vlog is typically a user-made video that uses the video as the medium for blogging. The word blog itself stems from the word web log, and the video blog is a form of expression that stems from blogs. This means that it allows for a more interactive expression of whatever the user wants to portray, including, but not at all limited to, content involving politics, cooking, humor, and of course, life lessons.

According to Richard Hall, a professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, he created his first vlog in May of 2005, about a raccoon eating from inside a bird-feeder. In “A Brief History of the Video Blog”, the vlog he showed at the annual Association for Internet Researchers conference in 2007, this moment “changed [his] life”. While Hall’s vlog is entitled “A Brief History of the Video Blog”, it is not necessarily a history of the vlog. Rather, it is a documentary vlog detailing several vloggers and the origins of how they started their vlogs and why they continued to make them. One interviewed vlogger mentions that he got into vlogging because one of the earlier vloggers said, “I’m so excited about video blogging because I can say whatever I want, and the FCC can’t do s**t”. I actually went to the FCC’s website to see if this is actually true, and I came across this page. They explicitly say that they do not regulate the internet. Thus, we have an arena, the internet, where people can post videos and give their thoughts on whatever they want without others interfering.