Enabling Video-Blogging without Relying on External Service-Providers

Emerging Web 2.0 technologies are increasingly making use of multimedia formats and furthermore allow users to produce their own content and refurbish information in a highly creative and collaborative way themselves. A new kind of Web-enabled platform that constitutes this user-empowerment are Weblogs. Connecting the increasing popularity of this Web application with the surging demand and use of multimedia formats, this paper focuses on the research topic of video-blogging (or ldquovloggingrdquo). Video-weblogs however mostly rely on third party services to store the accumulated video content. It is the opinion of this paperpsilas authors that it is more convenient and meaningful in specific circumstances, if the vlogging functionality - the hosting and streaming of videos - does not need to be outsourced to others at all. As a consequence, this paper introduces a new video-upload and -hosting application integrated into the widely accepted blogging software WordPress that does not rely on third party services as usual. The toolpsilas functionality will be proven on the basis of the use case of the IT-Gipfelblog.de presented in this paper.