IT IS the web phenomenon giving home movies a platform on the global stage. A digital camera and a computer are all you need to join the fastexpanding army of vloggers.

When the Royal Dragoon Guards placed their spoof (Is This The Way To) Amarillo? video on the net, the soldiers this week became the latest unlikely vlog stars. Shot at their base in al-Faw, in Iraq, the grainy film forwarded via e-mail became such an essential download that it crashed the MoD’s computer server.

Advances in digital camera technology, 3G phones and the spread of broadband have spawned a wave of websites devoted to video diaries, amateur films and family events posted for the world to view. They are known as video blogs or vlogs, an advance on the craze for blogs: the 6 million web logs devoted to daily text diaries or political viewpoints currently clogging up the net.

Luuk Bouwman, a Dutch student, posted a video diary of his Inca trail trip to Peru. His tropisms.org site is now the home for hundreds of offbeat video travelogues taking in destinations from Ethiopia to Chernobyl.

Vidblogs.com promises the “ultimate voyeur experiment”. It lists hundreds of films from the self-explanatory, I’m Bloated and I Can’t Get Up to avant-garde mini-epics, which are subject to close criticism by fellow digital film-makers.

Vloggers proved vital witnesses to the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster, posting images taken by digital cameras on websites, which were seized upon by international news organisations.

But what started as an amateur medium now has major business potential. Google, the search engine giant, is trying out a new service archiving people’s video clips, but users are likely to have to pay for storage space.

Even the most publicity-hungry figures can come to grief in the unregulated “blogverse”. Fred Durst, lead singer of US pop group Limp Bizkit, and Paris Hilton, the celebrity heiress, have both been unable to prevent private sex videos being distributed over the internet.

Vlogging is the future according to David Docherty, the chief executive of interactive entertainment company Yoo Media. He said: “The tools are simple and people are really having fun putting their lives on the net. You don’t have to crash servers with e-mails because vloggers can syndicate their work through a network of sites.”

Vlogging has opened a new medium for film-makers and musicians to get their work into the public domain. But there are likely to be more red-faced Paris Hiltons. “The blogverse is a giant souk,” warns Mr Docherty. “There is no copyright out there. Once you have posted a video blog, the internet owns it.” Vloggers are filling a gap in content for users of the latest generation of mobile phones. But handset owners are having more fun creating their own low-tech films and sharing them with friends and complete strangers.

Telecoms giants like Vodafone view vlogging as a potential new market. But they are concerned that without effective filters, vlogging could be submerged by home-made pornographic material.

HOW TO PRODUCE YOUR OWN VIDEO LOG

For a video tutorial, go to www.freevlog.org. Once you have become hooked on making vlogs, go to www.antisnottv.net. It lets you subscribe to video feeds and downloads new video to your computer automatically. Who needs television?

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