Personal Technology Tips in Plain English
Posts tagged videos
How To Optimize Your YouTube Videos Online
Sep 16th
By the time you finish reading this post, over 48 hours of new video content has been uploaded to YouTube.com — that’s a lot of videos each and every minute, day after day.
So the question quickly becomes, how do you make your videos stand out from the crowd?
The first answer is the make sure each video you upload is nice to look at and good enough to pass along. The actual video quality matters.
YouTube has wised up and added one feature I’ve long said they need to give casual users like you and me who want to upload periodic videos to the site. They’ve finally added an EDIT capability. Yea!
Now, you can do some *very basic* video quality optimization so that your iPhone vids get a little polish before others see them online. The video stabilization feature is one of the most interesting options so that your shaky camera footage calms down a bit during playback.
I’d love for YouTube to add features like Animoto offers so that you can go to YouTube as a one-stop-shop for actually creating and editing your work and then publish online all in one spot. But till then, we’ll take whatever we can get that helps us share better quality videos…for at least some of that 48 hours of new content, minute after minute of the day.
One Man’s Trash Is Another’s Treasure: 10 Websites For Swapping Your Stuff
Oct 16th
We learn all about making swaps from our childhood.
Remember when you used to negotiate a trade for baseball cards or any other collector’s items? Heck, we used to swap lunches sometimes — almost nothing was off limits.
But when you grow up, that all changes for some reason. What’s mine is mine, what’s your is yours. We go to great lengths in today’s culture to make sure people know just how much *stuff* we accumulate, unwilling to share it.
Here’s where the Internet is helping to disrupt culture, at least in some corners of the world.
Perhaps it is the economy, perhaps it is the new generation. Perhaps it is the “green” machine that’s making all of notice things like the fact that the average American throws out 68 pounds of clothing each and every year according to Good Housekeeping Magazine. 10 years…that’s 680 lbs of unnecessary death to clothing. 20 years. . . 30 years . . . And it doesn’t apply to just clothes!
The Internet has taken the friction out of making swaps or just plainly giving usable things away for someone else to enjoy it. Here’s a bunch of websites including some Good Housekeeping highlighted in their recent November 2010 issue which you can explore so that those DVDs, you know, the ones you bought in the 90′s…the ones you can admit that you’ll *never* watch again, can be exchanged for a shiny new DVD movie you can watch an upcoming weekend (especially since the Blockbuster store has gone R.I.P.!). Got a book? Exchange it! Got some baby toys or clothes? Swap it!
Here’s a list of 10 websites you can start with to get a (re)newed collection of things. . . Read the rest of this entry »
It’s all about YOU: How To Download YOUtube Videos
Dec 15th
In our culture today, It’s all about YOU. . .
YOUtube that is.
2007 was the year of online video and YouTube was at the forefront of it all. Google made a smart move to gobble up YouTube when it could.
Now there’s so much video content being produced and uploaded and the masses are taking to having their own YouTube procrastination breaks all throughout the day.
As if it’s so critical to have access to YouTube, even iPhone launch marketing collateral made a point of the fact that you can access YouTube videos on the iPhone. Yahee or Yahoo! J
Anyway, when you find that gem on YouTube, sometimes you wish you could just *keep it* or rather download it to save, forward or just watch over and over again offline to waste even more of your life. How do you do that?
Well, there’s a great site called KissYouTube that lets you do this. You simply visit www.kissyoutube.com and enter the URL of the YouTube video clip you’d like to save, and it will automatically allow you to download the video clip in a format that you can save and watch on your own computer without a flash-based browser.
OPTION #2: The Internet never offers just one choice. Here’s another option to download online videos into various formats for your PC, iPod, mobile phone, DivX, etc. www.vixy.net offers you several options with a drop down menu to select which format you’d like when you grab that video.
Or if you find that hilarious or inspiring music video, but want to download the audio track for your listening enjoyment in the car or on your mp3 player, there’s an option to download the audio into mp3 format only as well.
I love tech, gadgets and the web. Hope you pick-up a useful tip or two here today that helps you use technology to your advantage! Better yet, why not share your own expertise in a comment on a post today to help the other readers that land here for answers!