/* CSS Document */ Streamload Blog: November 2005

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

New blog address

This blog has moved! Please update your links; the new URL for the Streamload blog is:

http://blog.streamload.com

Thanks!

posted by Maxine @ 12:57 PM   0 comments links to this post

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Video blogging with Streamload

Some people call it v-logging, vlogging, or vblogging. Video blogging can be called many different things, but I call it one of the hottest new trends on the web. The number of online journals and web logs (or "blogs" for short) have grown exponentially in the past couple of years. Thanks to video blogs, you don’t have to limit your blog to just words – you can incorporate video clips and other forms of media to enrich your blog's content. Video blogging is the natural next step in this blogging craze, and Streamload can help you do it.

Video blogs can range from slickly produced video shorts to crude, unedited clips of someone talking directly into the camera – not unlike the "confessional" clips on MTV's The Real World. But whatever the content, video blogs are always about the individual: his or her thoughts, ideas, and opinions. (And if the individual isn’t all that deep, it's about his or her funny faces or lunch plates!)

Are you ready to share your video blog with the world? Here’s how to do it, and how Streamload can help make it happen.

Step 1: Creating Your Blog

There are tons of choices when it comes to publishing a blog on the Internet. The quickest and easiest option would be to use a blogging site like Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/), LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/), or MSN Spaces (http://spaces.msn.com/). Blogging sites don’t require you to download any special software, and most offer free accounts; the only thing you need to do to get started is to pick out a template for your blog’s look, and then type in your text. Easy peasy!

If you already have a website, you can download blogging software like Moveable Type or WordPress, which will enable you to create your own text blogs and upload them to any web host.

Once you’ve got your blog, the next step is making a video.

Step 2: Recording Your Video

To shoot some video, you can use a camcorder or web cam. You can simply shoot a straightforward clip of you talking right into the camera. Or, if you prefer, you can transfer a camcorder video into your computer and create an edited masterpiece complete with subtitles, captions, video effects, music, still images, etc – you’re only limited by your creativity. The secret is to keep it relatively short and concise; only your mother will want to see you discoursing on a topic for 20 minutes!

Once you have your video edited, you’ll need to compress it to a web-friendly format like Apple QuickTime, Windows Media, RealVideo, DivX, or even Flash Video. Compression is extremely important. For example, video straight out of a digital video camcorder is about 3.5 MB per second. This means that a short ten-second video clip would run 35 MB in size and could take hours to download! Luckily, most video editing programs – even free ones like Windows XP Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie – include powerful compression abilities. The simpler your movie, the easier it will be to compress and the better it will look. A straight shot of someone talking, flat lit with a static background, works the best – at least, from a compression standpoint. Once you have the video compressed and in a web format, you can then upload it to your Streamload account.

Step 3: Blogging Your Video

Using your paid Streamload membership, you can upload videos to your account, and then put them into your Hosted Files directory in order to link the files to your new video blog. When you move your video into Hosted Files, the file can easily be accessed using a link like http://www.streamload.com/yourusername/myvideo.mpg.

Once you’ve got your file’s Streamload link, you can post that link to your blog so that people can download or stream your video. Congratulations, you’re a star! A star on your very own video blog, that is! Don't forget, when someone accesses your video using the link, your account's download MBs are used.

If you need more guidance, you can find a couple of truly exceptional and easy-to-understand tutorials on how to create and post your own video blogs at http://www.freevlog.org/ and http://videoblogging.info/. If you’d like more information on hosting files from your Streamload account, send an email to our support staff at support@streamload.com. Our legion of Streamloadphiles will be happy to assist you with any questions.

Related links:
http://www.vidblogs.com/
http://www.bloglines.com/
http://tinyurl.com/7powy - A recent video blog entry from the actor Zach Braff, on his Garden State Blog.

Happy vlogging!
Maxine

posted by Maxine @ 2:53 PM   6 comments links to this post