By Mark O’Neill

I’ve been listening to the pros and cons recently about whether video comments should be inserted into blogs. I honestly can’t make my mind up whether or not it’s a good idea. Mashable and Techcrunch have both started doing it, but the general consensus across the web is that video comments are a bad idea and will end up becoming a short-lived fad.

Here are four pros and four cons regarding video comments, just off the top of my head :

Pros :

• Makes the blog more interactive.
• You can put a face, voice and personality to the comment.
• It’s difficult sometimes to work out what tone the person is taking in a text comment. With a video comment, you can see right away if the person is happy, sad, angry, whatever.
• It helps to build up a more intimate friendly blog community, which in turn helps the blog owner to build up the RSS subscriber base. People with wacky funny personalities will contribute more, people will visit more often to see the wacky funny people do their thing and so on.

Cons :

• The operator can’t moderate them
• You can’t leave links to your blog so people may be less inclined to leave a comment.
• The videos may slow the loading of the page down.
• Some people might get carried away with the whole thing and rant on and on. Who wants to listen to a ten minute rant?

What do you think about video blog comments? Can you think of another pro or con?

If GAS suddenly decided to introduce video commenting, would it make you more or less inclined to comment on the blog? Would you personally leave a video comment or is the whole thing just a silly fad?