Providing videos on your blog or website are a great way to get a point across, offer a how-to, tutorial style video, as well as entertain your readers with your many talents, if you have many talents. 
A screencast is a video made by recording what’s on your computer screen. Various tools can be used to record what’s on your computer screen including some of the tools I talked about in my article 4 Screen Recording Tools.
But, what do you do after you’ve recorded your screen? Well, you can upload your video(s) to various video sharing sites. For this article I’ll only concentrate on a few.
1. Flickr Video
Recently, flickr added the ability for users to upload 90 second videos for free accounts. We’ll see how the flickr video turns out as far as popularity. Flickr is so well known for photography that mixing in video could be just a ho-hum experiment so we’ll have to see what happens.
Obviously you can’t do a ton with 90 seconds but it keeps videos short and to the point as well as challenge your creativity to provide compelling videos.
2. 12Seconds
If you have a twitter account and use the twitter client TweetDeck, then you might have seen the 12seconds button that lets you see videos from the 12seconds site. With 12seconds, you communicate in 12 second chunks of video. These are comparable to the 140 characters that Twitter allows you to communicate with.
3. YouTube
Does YouTube need an introduction? Well maybe not, but I’d like to point out a few features that bloggers can use.
You can drive traffic to your blog by placing videos you create on YouTube and embed them in your blog posts. Providing a memorable watermark on your video, as well as a link in the first line of your description, could entice viewers to browse to your blog from YouTube.
Another feature of YouTube is a Channel. Channels are a page you setup on YouTube with your videos you’ve created. Typically the URL is http://www.youtube.com/user/<accountname>. In my case my YouTube Channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/billbolmeier.
Your YouTube Channel is your YouTube home page. Your profile on your YouTube Channel, which includes a link to your blog, can also help drive traffic to your blog.
The comments section of a YouTube video is where you can connect with the folks who watch your videos and comment. The same audience who just might become your blog readers.
There are links to popular social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and others that allows viewers to promote your video on those sites.
I did a 6-minute video on Ubuntu Linux 8.04 in April 2008 and as of today there are over 35,000 views with over 100 comments. The website address was embedded in the video as a watermark and in the first line of the description of the video to help drive traffic to that blog. It worked pretty well but overall I’d say YouTube video watchers seem to hang around YouTube and not stray too far.
4. Viddler
Viddler is another site you can publish your videos at. There’s a community section for friends, groups, comments, link your Twitter account in your profile as well as your Flickr account. Your viewers will also have the ability to promote your videos at other social networking sites. You can also embed Viddler videos in your blog posts with embed code. In fact, anyone can embed a video in their blog or website with the code provided.
5. Revver
Revver pretty much has everything we’ve talked about like the other video sharing sites offer, but include revenue sharing as well. The more you promote other videos and other folks promote your videos the more you can possibly make.
Videos at Revver are categorized to help focus viewers on what they’re looking for.
Revver has a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to include video in a blog post. Like each video sharing site I’ve talked about, there are embeddable video controls that look and act different from each one.
Other video sharing sites include:
- Vimeo
- blip.tv
- Yahoo Video
- Forget about Google Video, they’re not taking anymore uploads.
What’s Next?
Want to distribute your video to multiple video sharing sites at once? TubeMogul is a video distribution site that takes your video after you upload it to TubeMogul and distributes it to various video sites that you select for you.
TubeMogul offers analytics of your video from the various sites to help you see how your videos are doing.
Need a video search engine? Use Blinkx or Truveo. Blinkx is “the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine.” Billed as “the Remote Control for the Video Web”, Blinx has over 35,000 hours of searchable video.
Now that we’ve talked about video site we’ll create a video and distribute it. That will come in another post.
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