Terri J. Vaughn: The Real TV

Actress and philanthropist Terri J. Vaughn, best known for her roles on “The Steve Harvey Show” and “All of Us”, has recently started a video blog about her life and career titled “The Real TV”. Instead of going the YouTube or Vimeo route for distribution, Vaughn has chosen Facebook as her journal’s platform of choice. There are about ten or so installments so far, which judging from the comments began sometime in mid-November of last year and is updated every Monday. Topics range from Black actresses in Hollywood, reality TV, motherhood, and much more. Vaughn even interacts with her commenters and gets blog topics for future shows from them, showing that she is keeping tight reign over her presence on Facebook to her fans.

At first, I was skeptical of a Facebook-only blog, but after thinking about it, using the platform makes sense in a way. Facebook, even with its new extensibility of applications and recent Facebook Connect feature, is still a bit of a walled garden. For celebrities, this can be a double-edged sword; they can keep in touch with their fans directly and effectively block trolls and spammers due to Facebook’s privacy controls. However, exporting that information is not an option. To date, Facebook Notes or other content supplied to the network don’t offer any form of syndication, RSS or otherwise, so adding the blog to your feed reader might be a challenge. Alternatively, you could just add Vaughn as a Facebook friend and get updates that way.

To check out Terri on “The Real TV,” click here for the first installment.