In my opinion 10 times out of 10 content will always win out over quality in a videocast. Provided one is effective at getting the message across then it shouldn't matter whether that message is presented on some grainy LQ media or a (bandwidth hogging) bells and whistles HD broadcast. Surely there would be nothing more discouraging or detrimental to low budget amateur video bloggers than rubbishing his/her production values just because he/she doesn't possess the latest and most expensive video equipment. For me one of the best videocasts I've seen (aside from all gottabemobile's Inkshows of course :o) ) was produced by Kevin Tofel (the unboxing of his Q1) on his humble webcam.

Of course the term 'quality' could also encompass the actual content itself and I agree that there's little point in one producing a videocast if one's only producing it for the sake of saying he/she has produced one. A videocast has to have something of value in it so in that respect 'quality of content' is of course important.

Personally, I don't see a difference between video blog entries and any other blog entry. If a blogger wishes to put the extra effort into cleaning up his or her presentation, fine. If not, who cares? They should no more apologize for shaky video quality than for poor spelling, bad grammar, blurry pictures, messy handwriting, or an obnoxious voice. (Or perhaps I should be apologizing for all that... Nah!)

Yes, there will be repercussions in terms of viewership and visitor count, but that's affected more by content than quality. A shaky video of "college girls getting naked on spring break" will get more clicks than a crystal clear video of "college girls bundling up for winter". (At least I've never seen ads or spam for the latter.)

For me it is about communication. The production values can be huge and the blogger may still fail to get their point across.
Actually what concerns me more is the proliferation of professional news outlets producing blogs. To illustrate my point, as a football nut (round ball)I am following the world cup & every news outlet from the BBC down has one or more blogs. I dont see the point of this as professional journos have their own route to market through websites and traditional print. This just waters down the blogging concept. It would be different if the journo put up their own blog to give us an unofficial comment on the inner workings of the say the BBC but they dont, it is just normal news reporting dressed up with a bit of local colour. I participate in the blogsphere to escape from the 'spin' of professional media; long live the amateur shaky camera and all.

I might get shot for this, but we'll see.

I don't like podcasts or video blogging. The problem I have with these mediums is that they take too much time for me to go through. I can't skim a podcast or video the way I can an article. I also can't exactly skip to the part I'm interested in either with search or table of contents (which some podcasters and vloggers are including these days and audio/video search is coming).

On the other hand you have a video or podcast running while you are busy doing something and if something catches your fancy you can focus in on it, and otherwise you can mostly ignore it. That might work for me in the future, but at this point I still prefer reading blog entries over watching them.

So long as the quality isn't so bad that it induces motion sickness or obscures the meaning, I have no problem. It's about getting the message out the best possible way; and most of the time it's not necessary to go to 720p to make your point!

-- Steve