Nobody likes a close talker.

Keep your distance from the camera. If your vidcast involves speaking directly to your audience, make sure you’ve set a good distance between yourself and the camera.

Of course, if you’re too far away, the connection between audience and subject is difficult to maintain, like you’re straining to see someone from far away, no matter how high the video resolution.

But what’s equally annoying is watching a vidcaster whose face occupies too much of the screen.

WebbAlert is a perfect example of this. Even if you’re pretty like Morgan Webb, having your face that close to the camera just feels weird. Head movements feel exaggerated when that’s all you see. It’s like watching a floating face speak to you. There’s just something terribly eerie about that.

While she’s been in Tokyo and filming from her hotel room, she’s been farther away from the camera, making for a much more comfortable vidcast.

Look at the distance between the news anchors on CNN and the camera. You see enough of them that you don’t feel too close, but they fill enough of the screen that you don’t feel like you’re spying on them from far away.

We’ll have to wait and see whether tomorrow’s episode of WebbAlert will have her face-to-face with the audience again, but I’m hoping that she’ll have learned from her past few Tokyo shows, and will adapt her regular broadcasts.