Cool 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 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 phonesusing its nifty Mobile Upload option in conjuction with the MMScapability 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 youcan 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 subscribedto through the online iTunes Music Store interface.While the terminitially 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 exportformats in Apple's Quicktime 7 Pro.If you have a Mac,it will beunderstandably 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.Ofcourse,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.