Tag: YouTube

Managing for Excellence Presentation

Today I’m doing a presentation to the Managing for Excellence meeting at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. This is a meeting of all Jacksonville supervisors, and I get a chance to tell them about what Mayo is doing in social media.

On our internal blog I did a post with links to some of our projects (many of which I had previously highlighted here), but I’m closing my fast-paced presentation (I only get 15 minutes) with a little more “show” to go along with the “tell.”

I’m planning to show:

I will be updating this post during the meeting today, embedding a video, for instance.

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m3vfIgfTVI]

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Blogging Platforms Compared

Note: This post is Blogging 105, part of the Blogging curriculum at Social Media University, Global.

In developing the curriculum for Social Media University, Global I had originally planned to have Blogging 105 be about the pros and cons of WordPress.com and WordPress, with Blogging 106 and 107 providing the same analysis for Blogger and Typepad/Movable Type, respectively.

If someone wants to write those posts (106 and 107), I would be glad to have you join the SMUG faculty as a visiting professor. But given limited time (and my increasing satisfaction with WordPress.com and WordPress), I will focus on why this platform is both a great way to get started with blogging, and also why it provides flexibility for growth as you become more serious about it.

I have limited experience with both Blogger and Typepad. They’re both fine, and their major advantages from my perspective is that you can embed flash-based widgets, which is something you can’t do, for security reasons, on WordPress.com. That lets you put all those sharing icons like this:

…at the bottom of your posts. I had a friend describe WordPress.com as “Digg-proof,” which is a limitation, I suppose. You can overcome it by moving to a WordPress installation on a rented server, however, so it’s not a crucial deficiency in WordPress.com, from my perspective. And I guess it helps with security, so some malicious Flash application can’t bring down thousands of WordPress.com blogs

WordPress.com Benefits

  • It’s free, and comes with 3 gigs of storage for photos and documents. No credit card needed to get going. No 14-day free trial. You can start now in about 30 seconds, and could quite possibly blog long-term without spending a penny.
  • If you’re nervous about starting, you can make your blog private and get hands-on experience without anyone seeing. (Or if you want to get experience in a blogging playground, check out the Training Wheels blog, where I would be happy to make you an Author.)
  • It’s Open Source, so lots of unpaid programmers are adding cool features really rapidly.
  • You can embed YouTube or Google videos (and some other types), as well as Slideshare.net slide shows.
  • If you want to use WordPress.com as a podcast server, you can pay another $20 a year to upgrade your storage to 8 gigs, and to enable you to upload mp3 or video files. (More on this soon.)
  • Bandwidth is unlimited and free. If you can upload it to WordPress.com, your blog visitors can download it. It doesn’t matter how many of them visit.
  • You can create workflows for an editorial process. You have a hierarchy that runs from Contributor (can write posts but can’t publish) to Author (can publish and edit own posts) to Editor (can edit anyone’s posts) to Administrator (can do all of the above plus add or delete users and change blog design.) So if you want people to be able to write posts but want a quality check before they go live, you can have that process built into your publishing tool.
  • URLs are in plain English, and you can edit them for search engine benefits. For example, I have given this post a URL that ends …global/blogging-platforms-compared/. Google looks at that URL and deduces that this post might just be about comparing blogging platforms. So if anyone searches on those terms, I’ll be likely to come up higher in the rankings than if I had a Typepad URL like …/blogging-platfo.html
  • Upgrade costs are minimal. For $15 a year you can customize the look and feel of your blog, as we did here and here and here. For $10 a year you can map your blog to another domain or subdomain (see the same examples, as well as the domain name you see in your browser right now), although it may cost you another $10 to register a domain name (like social-media-university-global.org). I already mentioned the $20 a year fee for 5 gigs of extra storage, and for $30 you can have an unlimited number of private users. Add it all up and you’d have a hard time finding a way to spend over $100 a year on a fully featured WordPress.com blog. A comparably equipped TypePad blog would be at least $300 a year, and more likely $900.
  • If your blog becomes wildly successful and you want to start offering Google Adwords or Flash-based applications, you can transfer your blog from wordpress.com to a server you control (and that you can rent for maybe $10 a month.) Just update your server’s IP address with your registrar, and you can make the move without losing any links.

As I said earlier, I would welcome as a visiting professor anyone who would want to explore the pros and cons of either Blogger or Typepad in a guest post. Or if you have experiences with any of these platforms that you would like to share in the comments, please do!

Otherwise, what are you waiting for? Get started with WordPress.com now.

Can YouTube Beat Facebook Video Quality?

I recently had an interesting experience with a video I posted both to our Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel and to the official Mayo Clinic Facebook “fan” page. The video was created to provide a behind-the-scenes tour of the new Mayo Clinic Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla. I uploaded the same file to both YouTube and Facebook, and the quality difference is striking.

Here’s the YouTube version:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UT6vmldLRw]

It looks fine, but my friend Hoyt, the star of the video, was struck by the superior clarity of the same video on the Mayo Clinic Facebook page. I had noticed this previously with some other videos I had uploaded.

Obviously YouTube has the volume and critical mass for video sharing (and the advantage that you can embed it within blogs, while with Facebook you can only offer a link), but I wonder why YouTube’s quality is so much lower.

Is it because of the sheer volume of videos, that because YouTube is processing so many new uploads every day so it can’t afford to devote the processing power that would render the videos more clearly in Flash? Does the fact that Facebook has a video application for its platform contribute to the quality difference? Or are there some settings that would make YouTube videos look better? The one I uploaded was 137 megs for about a 6-minute video in mpeg format.

What settings would you recommend for export to get maximum quality in videos uploaded to YouTube, while keeping file sizes reasonable?

And do you have to be a fan of Mayo Clinic to see the Facebook version? I’m assuming you have to be at least a Facebook member, although you can at least see the basic fan page without being a member.

What do you think? What’s your experience with maximizing video quality in YouTube? Can it be as good as what you see in Facebook?

Updated: I tried clicking the video link without being logged in to Facebook, and I could see the video, so it seems it isn’t necessary to be a Facebook member to see Facebook video.

Fast Flip Video Uploads

Here’s a video I took this evening while dining with my bride at her favorite local Chinese buffet restaurant, in celebration of the anniversary of her birth:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX23tLwjYoo]

I uploaded it directly from the Flip video camera to YouTube. It isn’t particularly long, but within 10 minutes of upload it was processed and ready for viewing.

This is just to illustrate how quick and easy it is to upload video to the web using the Flip. Instead of having to digitize from a tape, which takes at least the length of time required to connect the camera to your computer and play the tape segment, the file can be almost instantly uploaded. And if you don’t want to edit, you can just upload the raw video.

Not that you generally should. It’s really easy to edit the video files, so you can trim extraneous seconds to improve the presentation. But if you catch some extraordinary event, you can show it to the world within a few minutes.

I’ll be doing some exploration of the balance between time to worldwide video availability and quality of the product. Let’s just say that what you see above minimizes both, and that I spent twice as long writing this blog post as YouTube and I together spent producing and processing the video.

Blogging 130: Video Blogging with Flip and iSight

Note: Every required course in the Social Media University, Global curriculum is free. In this one, I’m reviewing a product for video blogging that isn’t free, but it’s certainly inexpensive. Because of the cost, however, this course is an elective, not part of the core curriculum. But please at least do the course reading below, even if you’re not able to complete the homework assignment.

For the last several years I’ve been using my miniDV camera for producing amateur movies, whether for fun work projects or family videos. In fact, I have a huge drawer full of miniDV tapes that have captured many of my family memories, and which I have used to create high school graduation retrospectives for my two oldest kids, and for some wedding videos. And although I’m a self-taught producer, I’m pretty pleased at what I’ve been able to create with relatively simple tools.

One thing that makes producing these videos, well…a production is the need to digitize the footage, connecting the camera to the computer via Firewire, and playing the whole tape to import files that can be edited in iMovie (or one of the Final Cut versions.)

But thanks to recommendations from Steve Lubetkin and Monty Flinsch, I’ve recently (this weekend) begun exploring the Flip camera as a video blogging alternative. My one-word review:

Amazing.

I’ve seen Scoble do his Qik gig, and it’s pretty cool to have “a TV station in your pocket,” which you can use to stream video live to the web. But while I personally find my life really interesting, I think most of my readers would prefer the edited version. And besides, the quality of the live video stream (even from a 3G phone) still needs some work.

That’s what’s so compelling about the Flip: for a ridiculously low price ($119 for 30 minutes, $149 for 60 minutes), you can get a camera that records 640 x 480 video with decent sound into files that you can edit instantly and upload to YouTube or another video blogging platform, or to Facebook.

In fact, I started shooting the segment you see below at 7:15 p.m. CDT Tuesday, using a Flip Ultra and a cheap tripod. It took a couple of tries to say something close to what I wanted. So I was done recording by 7:20. Then I plugged the camera’s built-in USB extension that flips out (Get it? Flip?) into my computer’s USB port, and completed the editing by 7:25 using QuickTime Pro. I exported at 30 frames per second and best quality, which took about four minutes for this 75-second clip. By 7:32 I was uploading to YouTube. Total time from shooting to uploading: 17 minutes.

Then my youngest son asked me to go out for a run (with him on his scooter), so I took a blogging break. I’m not sure how long the upload took because I was away while it finished, but that will vary for you anyway, based on your Internet connection speed.

One hour later…

Continue reading “Blogging 130: Video Blogging with Flip and iSight”