Sites for video blogging.

Youtube
www.youtube.com
Besides
being one of the most popular video blogging web sites,Youtube is one
of the oldest of its kind.Founded in 2005,this web site provides a free
platform that facilitates the sharing of user-created videos.Once you
are registered with the site you become a member and can upload your
videos in MPEG,AVI or MOV format.You can even upload MPEG4(DivX or
XviD-encoded video clips) for higher video quality.After recording
movies using your camcorder,digital still camera (using the movie mode)
or your video-capable cell phone,you can use one of several free tools
to convert your video to any of the above formats before uploading
them.Members also have access to other facilities including the ability
to edit posts to their videos and remove them later if they wish to.The
web site also lets you tag your videos,which makes it easier to search
and locate videos of specific content and subject.To protect
privacy,uploaded videos can be set to be private or public,thus
restricting viewing access.Another cool feature is the ability to
directly upload videos from mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones
using its nifty Mobile Upload option in conjuction with the MMS
capability of your phone.
For
first-time users,the site includes a comprehensive help section that
describe the web site's capabilities along with answers to
frequently-asked questions regarding posting and managing video
posts.For both members and guests of the site,you can even link its
hosted videos to other web sites by embedded them directly into the web
page.
Metacafe
www.metacafe.com
Another
web site offering similar capabilities to that of Youtube is
Metacafe.It serves as a video sharing platform,allowing users to post
their video clips.Founded in Israel,this site has over 20 million
unique visitors Watching over 400 million video streams each month.Here
too,after a free registration you can proceed to upload your own
videos.The video quality standards used on Metacafe are of a noticeably
higher quality than that used on other video sharing platforms such as
Youtube.To be able to upload videos,a 4.8 MB client application needs
to be downloaded and installed on the client computer,after which you
can upload content,rate clips,post user comments or share the clips
with a friend.The application also allows you to save clips to your
computer for office offline viewing.Besides user-posted video clips,the
web sites also offers movie trailers,games and other fun stuff.
Podcasting
www.apple.com/podcasting
For
all those who use iTunes as their music management and MP3 playback
needs,you've probably already heard of podcasting.This is the term
given to the ability to share user-created audio and video clips on
Apple's iTunes network.Podcasts are "channels" that can be subscribed
to through the online iTunes Music Store interface.While the term
initially applicable to user-created audio streams,podcasts can now be
video-based as they are primarily intended to run on Apple's video
enabled iPods (though they can be downloaded and viewed on any
video-capable computer or handheld device that supports the video
standard).As regard the video standard,podcasts can only be created in
M4V,MP4 or MOV video formats which happens to be native video export
formats in Apple's Quicktime 7 Pro.If you have a Mac,it will be
understandably easier to create a podcast by using a DV camera and the
iSight software used for capturing and saving your video file.This can
be done on a PC using the applicable software to grab video and export
it to the supported format.Unlike the video blogging web sites
described earlier,you cannot actually upload videos to the iTunes Music
Store- to share podcasts,you will need to first host your video as an
enclosure on an existing blogging service such as "Blogger" and then
provide the RSS link on the iTunes Music Store.After this is done,it
shows up on the iTunes Music Store listing in the podcast category.Of
course,this is the best way to share your video clips with iPod users
as they are synchronized with the device through the iTunes
interface.There are numerous detailed tutorials on how to do this on
iTunes Music Store and on other web sites.
Now
that the capablity exists on the device(be it a cell phone,camcorder or
digicam),the ability to share your videos with the world is a powerful
capability for communication.While video blogging is still at an
embryonic stage in the country,there are many examples of surprisingly
popular users who partake of everything from citizen journalism to
kitschy video clips of their daily experiences.Still,there is no
denying the power behind this trend of any-users video sharing.