Thursday, August 28, 2008

# 18 (Week 8) Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow users to upload and share videos

Over the last few years online video hosting sites have exploded - allowing users to easily upload and share videos on the web. Among all the web 2.0 players in this area, YouTube is currently top dog serving up over 1 million video views a day and allowing users not only to upload their own video content easily, but also embed clips into their own sites easily.

Do some searching around YouTube yourself and see what the site has to offer. You'll find everything from 1970s TV commercials and 60s music videos to library dominos and a video made by library school students for National Library Week. There's also the cult classic Conan the Librarian. Of course, like any free site you’ll also find a lot of stuff not worth watching too. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore and see for yourself what the site has too offer. :)

Discovery Exercise:

  1. Explore YouTube & find a video that interest you. Have a further look at The best of library videos blog and Infotubey-award winning library videos. Do you think library videos can be a fun marketing tool or 'infomercial'?

  2. Create a blog post about your experience. What did you like or dislike about the site and why did you choose the video that you did? Can you see any features or components of the site that might be interesting if they were applied to library websites?

  3. Use your gmail account to email northshorelibraries@gmail.com with a link to your blogpost. Please put Exercise #18 in the subject heading.

OPTIONAL: Try placing the video inside your blog using the copy and paste code for the "Embeddable Player.” Note: you'll need to use Blogger's Edit HTML tab when pasting this code.(YouTube has instructions on how to do embed a video.)

Have a look at the fun this library had:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice surprise to find how really easy it was to place a video in a post.