This latest hip, cutting-edge, trendy thing to do on the web is vlogging, or video weblogging. Cringely has something in the works along those lines.

You won't be seeing it here, ever.

I won't foreswear linking to video clips produced by others, and I could even see keeping a clip on my own site (mirroring it, the way Steven Den Beste has mirrored important articles as insurance against their deletion from other sites). But I won't be producing any talking-head video of my own, even if I had the gear and software on hand to do it.

Remember what the first "T" in "HTTP" stands for? Text. A decade plus change after its creation, text is still the ideal medium for information on the web.

Storage and server bandwidth may be getting cheap, but it isn't yet free. And client-side broadband may be getting more popular, but it isn't yet ubiquitous. I want to keep the blogosphere open to readers on dial-up links or using text-based browsers, and bloggers using low- or no-cost hosting services.

I want search engines to be able to easily parse content. I want people to be able to skim or speed-read what I write. I want people to be able to extract quotes and include them in their responses. How do you fisk a video clip?

And what ever happened to the notion that, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog?

I want to hear from people who would not consider talking to a camera, whether because they are camera-shy, or unattractive, or anonymous, or have an unpleasant voice (or cannot speak at all). On video, Stephen Hawking is a cripple, an object of pity; in text form, his intellect rings out as clearly as a church-bell, and he is the object of admiration. I know which I prefer.

And finally, I want to keep the blogosphere technologically free; I don't want content to be trapped in a vendor-owned format. I browse and blog from Mozilla on Linux, and prefer to stick to that environment as much as possible. True, there is a version of RealPlayer for Linux (still one major rev behind their Windows player), but if a clip is in QuickTime or Windows Media Player format, I have to switch to a Windows box, assuming there is one at hand. Text and HTML are vendor-neutral and ubiquitous; video data is not. (Though the Ogg Theora and XviD people may change that in the future.)

I realize that I'm in a tiny, reactionary minority on this one. When Cringe proposed going video, I was almost the only person on his comment board to speak out against it. And no one else in the blogosphere seems to be questioning whether vlogging really is a step forward.

Video already has a home, in broadcast and cable. The Web should aim higher, and remain true to itself.