Forget the bloggers, it's the vloggers showing the way on the internet

When Luuk Bouwman finished college he did what so many graduates do and decided to spend a year travelling.

He packed his rucksack with clothes and a video camera and jumped on a plane to Peru. Machu Picchu beckoned. But when Mr Bouwman got on to the Inca trail and then further into rural Peru, he took a more unusual route.

He slipped into the now ubiquitous - even, he says, in Peruvian one-horse towns - internet cafe, got out his digital video camera and began uploading the tales of his travels on to his website back in the Netherlands. Then, each week, the rest of the world was free to watch his travel diary.

Mr Bouwman is the vanguard of the latest internet trend: video logging or vlogging. One step up from the now familiar internet blogger, vloggers upload personal video clips of everything from the US Democratic convention to what they had for their tea, via rants about tax rises and conspiracy theories.

"When I went there were very few video logs on the web and most of them were very introverted," says Mr Bouwman. "I wanted to take this video web log concept and go as far away from technology as possible. So I took it right into the Amazon."

Mr Bouwman was at an advantage to the average person who wants to take up vlogging: he had just graduated from film school.

His website ( has evolved into one of the slickest vlogging sites on the internet. It is a way for him and other young documentary makers to self-publish their work. "I get up to 500 unique visitors a day, nothing compared to TV, but a full cinema still," he says.

But not all vlogging is so slick. In its most basic form, vlogging does not require very hi-tech equipment: a digital video camera, a high-speed connection and a host are all that is needed. It is still not an easy pursuit, but the gradual simplification of the technology is bringing an increasing number of people into vlogging - and politicising it.

Click on and you'll find a video of a Manchester anti-war demonstration posted by Anonymous Hero. It's the sort of rally by school and university students too small to make it on to the national media, but here it is being thrown open to a global audience.

"I set up the site because I saw a need for a portal for independent, grassroots video that wanted to affect social change," says Alan Bushnell, who runs Demand Media. But, though Mr Bushnell says he is receiving more submissions, he admits there are obvious limitations with vlogging.

"People are taught to write from childhood, however there is no analogous experience of learning to produce video," he says.

Steve Garfield, a video producer from Boston, Massachusetts, has no problems with the medium. He uses his website to be a "citizen journalist", which he describes as "anyone who decides to tell a story and share it".

Mr Garfield posts about two vlogs a week, on everything from beer and local human interest stories to an off-beat daily report from the recent Democratic convention. There are still only a few hundred vlogging sites on the web - compared with literally thousands of blogging sites - but Mr Garfield predicts that more internet users will get involved in vlogging once the technological barriers come down.

"As tools come out that make it easier, more people will start creating video blogs," he says. "The barriers to entry now are the number of steps it takes to get a video published on the web. You've got to shoot the video, digitise it, edit it, compress it for web delivery, upload it to a host and post it to your blog."

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aisling Kelliher is working on a research project that uses new technology which allows vlogs to be created using the new generation mobile phones.

"At the moment a lot of people who video log are in schools or institutions where the cost is not an issue and they have access to the technology," she says.

"I have done three or four experiments with giving people cell phones they could use to create a video log. We got things like a video log of someone recovering in hospital. It was very moving. It's a great way to get people to begin to play around with video."

But as the technology simplifies and the cost of vlogging goes the way of all new technology and tumbles, the obvious question looms large: why would anyone want to create video log that, at best, a few hundred people are going to see?

"It's a form of self-publicity, of course, anything put out from home pages is self promotion in some form," says Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University who specialises in the psychology of the internet.

"It may be that they are trying to get an argument out, it may just be a cathartic experience. You are never going to get a single answer. Life can be humdrum and it's a way for people to put themselves in touch with the bigger questions and issues."

From Detroit to Ethiopia, all eyes on the future

What started as a personal video log has grown into a collective vlog with a small group of filmmakers. One of the sleekest sites on the net, it includes current vlogs from Chernobyl and Ethiopia

Boston-based video producer who wants to show that eventually anyone will be able to create original video on the net. Highlights include a quirky look at the recent Democratic convention in Detroit

Eschews the video-diary vlog concept for video logs that are concerned with social change. Gives a voice to groups and individuals who would never otherwise be heard, but may be a little too right-on for some tastes

Billed as the ultimate public voyeur experiment, the site is full of short films of up to six minutes of ordinary lives.

Detroit-based site with a mission to produce non-traditional video. Highlight is a series of interviews about the American draft during the Vietnam war

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