Blogging Visually

Confidence. I lack it.

In this case it's confidence in my ability to write. My lack of confidence in everything else can be equated the metaphorical elephant in the room.

It's quite the double-edged sword, blogging is. On one hand, I can talk in ways here that would get me slapped across the face. Not that I do, but I could. On the other hand, I seem to suck at the only language I know how to speak in. I have habits of writing really long run-on sentences and overuse commas, so much so that it starts to get confusing and I'm sure the average Avalonstar reader gets a laugh out of my excuse for grammar at times. That's only the tip of the iceberg. Remember, you see the version that's been read over about 15 times.

I've always had an affinity for public speaking. It's something that's been a part of me since the 8th grade and when I'm prepared, I seem to do a pretty good job at it.

Forget for a second the time I accepted the Best Blog award at the 2006 SXSW Web Awards where the only words that came out of my mouth were "uh" and "Look, I'm on the screen." Forget for a minute the instance where I presented by myself for the first time at the Webmaster Jam Session and had to improvise after going through my hour-long presentation in half that time. If you disregard any time you've probably ever seen me on stage, I'm pretty good at this.

What I really need is the charisma of Merlin Mann and the voice of Dan Rubin, but alas, I'm stuck with the atrocities that puberty left me. Lessons? Operations? Please?

Oh, did I mention I tend to get lost in my thoughts when writing? Too late for that, let's move on. In the coming weeks, I want to mix things up a little. I had a lot of fun--subtracting the fact that I had a couple of Coronas--doing the mediacast about Distortion, and in order to make me feel like ScreenFlow is paying for itself, I want to do more of them.

So here's my half-thought-out plan.

ScreenFlow & Keynote, in place of the usual blog post fare. I see it as more of a visual blog post rather than a videocast or presentation. That way I'll save you the horrors of having to read my writing all the time, leaving you to deal with my voice accompanied by pretty transitions and animations.

Why? Keeps things fresh. I'm trying to find different ways to express things I would usually want to write about, instead of defaulting to say--a Django post. The more I think about things to write, the less I feel I have to say about design--a fact that makes sense considering the hobbies I've been taking up lately.

Let's leave this with a nice open end. Thoughts? Suggestions? Tomatoes?