Apropos of my my recent post about the transition from books to vooks and, ultimately, perhaps, the demise of text, I stumbled across something called the Article Video Robot. It takes tired old text and converts it to vibrant, compelling video. To try it out, I entered the text of a recent post here at Knowbodies about Wanting to want. See the ghastly end-product here. Of course, some might object, what can you expect, with "garbage in, garbage out"? So I tried again with a bit of real poetry...Larkin's The Trees. It didn't fare much better however...same lurid backdrop, same clumsy hybrid of spoken and written text, and same bass thumping in the background (Jaco P?). Sample it here (love that final message: "Philip Larkin is an 'Expert Author' and a well known expert in the Arts-and-Entertainment field.")
To be fair, these "article to video" services are not intended for bloggers or poets, but for article marketers (Article marketing - a genre new to me - "is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry"). But it's interesting to note that there are many such services - (just search for "article to video", e.g. www.videoarticlesecrets.com, www.article2video.com), and they all seem to share the conviction that showing/telling is a more effective way of getting a message across than writing. Is that necessarily true? Google seems to think so, and there is also a very compelling SEO rationale for marketers favoring video over text, explained with great urgency here.
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