Howard Rheingold, an authoritative figure on the study of social, political and cultural implications of technologies, launched a videoblog.

As written in Smart Mobs:

I’ve launched a video blog at http://vlog.rheingold.com and plan/hope to update it weekly. Spread the word! It all started when I started thinking about updating A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community, which I wrote twenty years ago. It didn’t take long to realize that a description of how I spend my time online these days would be conveyed more effectively via video/screencast than plain text. Once I got rolling, I realized that it would take more than one episode to show how and why I spend time reading RSS, scanning blogs, blogging, gardening wikis, posting in virtual communities, Twittering, teaching, etc. So the first month or so will feature episodes of A (re)Slice of Life Online. However, once I started including my indoor and outdoor offices in the videos, it occurred to me that I ought to explain something about the parts of my life that haven’t been so visible to my readers — the painting, gardening, sculpting that are as important to me as the publishing activities that are most visible to others.

Howard Rheingold summarizes in 4.31 minutes the development of digital media and introduces the concept of participatory media and their 3 distinct characteristics:

• many to many distribution
• evolution in social media
• development of social networks

Stay tuned for more video podcasts of the author, where “he reslices his life online.”