I’m a bit obsessed with Skype because it is such a great quality service.  You can call all over the world just by buying Skype credit.

I use PrettyMay a lot myself and I found the Professional license version sufficient for my needs to have unlimited recordings. Read the full article with 2 video tutorials here.

Cheers,
Rudolf Boogerman

The video used as an example  on the American Small business site is rather compplicated to achieve and that is part of its charm, actually. It is not exactly the ideal example for a start up entrepreneur with a tight budget, but a fun message doesn’t need to be that complicated, of course.  Most brilliant ideas are simple.  As long as you get a smile on the viewer’s face, your video commercial will have a good chance of going viral on the internet:

Have a look here: http://www.americansmallbusiness.com/default.asp?ArticleID=1308

To celebrate Spring after a loooong winter, Miracle Tutorials at www.miracletutorials.com organizes The video Watermark Contest which will run until the 1st of May 2009! The winner of this contest will receive a full license of VidLogo, an excellent utility for Windows to burn mark existing- and new videos fast and easy.
Read their review on Vidlogo to know more about this software.

The license has a value of $40 USD (minus 5 cents), which isn’t that enormous, but your video will be promoted on this site during 3 months on a prominent spot AND on www.womencorp.org. So, if your video happens to promote something or you want to show off your artwork, this is your chance!  That AND the very convenient VidLogo application AND the fact that YOU are chosen by the international team of the Jury as THE BIG WINNER!!!  That should count for something, we would think.
Click here or the banner below to find out about the contest >>>

Here is a really interesting video conducted by Mike MacDonald where he interviews Bruce Clay, about this subject:
http://videos.webpronews.com/2008/11/17/pubcon-bruce-clay-ranking-is-dead/

If you followed this excellent video interview, you probably have noticed that there will be some issues about privacy for the Google users, because Google will base search results partly on the IP address of the user and his/her previous search history.  So far, this approach was only used when searching in the personal Google account, but now it will become a web wide approach and that means that the search history of every user will become publicly available.  I can imagine this will give cause to heated discussions on forums here and there.

No videos on your site yet?  Don’t panic, it isn’t that bad.

We have to put one thing in perspective: search engines are not the only way to attract traffic.  Bruce and other SEO experts tend to give more importance to search engines then they actually deserve, because search engines normally should only accounts for approximately 25%-50% of your traffic.
The rest of your traffic should come via social networking, links with other sites, mouth- to-mouth advertising, traditional advertising and/or TV commercials.  So, if you haven’t been deploying video or audio so far, there is no reason to panic.

However, it is clear that the internet is changing dramatically, therefore the sooner you come to terms with using audio or video on your site,  the better.  Besides, it is actually big fun to create your own videos once you get into the routine of doing it. My site www.miracletutorials.com has a whole series on how to create your own video channel, what tools to use, how to improve your video and audio etc …

I do not know about you, but I watched this video over and over again.  It made me feel happy.  It made me wanting to see more videos from Krizia and that is what we need to achieve if we want to make a lasting impression on our audience.  The quality of the video is not great, it is a bit blurry, but the performance is so genuine that all the rest is unimportant.  Even better, the fact that the video is not a studio product, makes it real.  Please, have a look and enjoy:

You see what I mean? Even if you are not interested in the subject, you can not help watching it, do you?  Humor in combination with sincerity is the key to success.

Do you agree or disagree?  Let me know what you think!

1. you are not limited to videos of 10 minutes
2. You are in total control over the branding of your video/TV channel and its players
3. You are in control over the ads appearing on your videos, if any.
4. You can sell videos directly on your site.
5. The hosting fee is lower then a monthly account with AudioAcrobat, namely $10/month
6. You will have an astounding amount of monthly bandwidth and web space

If this sounds like music in your ears, read on, because John is working on a series of video tutorials combined with text articles and a couple of free utilities to help you to set it all up.  Over the coming 2 weeks, he will create 4 tutorials.

Here is the introduction article to the series.  He takes you by the hand, and step by step, you will develop your own video channel, including a content management system, either with Joomla or WordPress.

Everything is explained in detail and if you have questions, you can drop a comment on one of the articles.
Even if you do not want to do all this by yourself, it is still worthwhile to follow along to see what the options are.  And the great things is, it is totally for free.

Oh, and before I forget, you do not need to be a programmer to do this.  Some very basic knowledge of html is certainly useful, but other then that, it is easy to follow.

The first lesson, step 1 of 4 is already published in the meantime as well:
http://www.miracletutorials.com/creating-your-own-video-channel-1/, however, I would advice to sign up for the newsletter of Miracle Tutorials first because then you the choice between a couple of interesting redeem vouchers that are very useful in Step 1.  Also, you will get a newsletter by email once Step 2 is published, so that you do not need to come back to the site every time to check.
Here is the link: Join the newsletter

Have a great time :-)

Heather is not easily excited about things, and she hates complicated stuff,so you can count on it: here you have a free audio service that at the same time is a radio channel and a social network and it is dead-easy to operate.  Here is an excerpt of what BlogtalkRadio has to say about its own service:

BlogTalkRadio is the social radio network that allows users to connect quickly and directly with their audience. Using an ordinary telephone and computer hosts can create free, live, call-in talk shows with unlimited participants that are automatically archived and made available as podcasts. No software download is required. Listeners can subscribe to shows via RSS into iTunes and other feed readers. Our network has produced tens of thousands of episodes since it launched in August of 2006.

You can actually compare this with setting up your own video channel on youtube with the difference that the emphasis is on audio and it has of course a couple of other interesting features that you would not find on video channels, like the points you find in bold below:

“I didn’t know hard drives can die on me so quickly”

Any piece of hardware can die on you any moment, even the best brands can fail suddenly! The first 3 months are often critical. If the hard drive survives that period without hickups, it will probably live for a long time. However, there are exceptions and therefore you best have a second hard drive as a backup. The torture never stops, I know :-)

According to the article at the end of this post, it is better to have several smaller drives then one big and I agree with that. I would rather go for a 500mb or smaller and buy a second drive. You probably only pay a bit more because you’re buying a drive that is no longer a hype. So, instead of buying the latest Terrabyte(1000Gb) hard drive, buy 2 of 500Gb or if your computer configuration permits it: 3X 300Gb.

Big hard drives of 1terrabyte and more are slower, it takes longer to scan, find errors and to defrag (read part I on defragmentation). However, in the near future, Terabyte hard drives will be become the norm and they will get faster in time. You can buy already drives that are twice the speed of normal drives. Actually everything becomes faster and bigger but that makes hardware even more vulnerable and prone to error because heat and speed are directly related to wear and tear. Keep in mind: It takes time to overcome the typical infancy problems of new products.
Hence my motto: never go for the hype, go for well tested material.
I bought a MyBook of Western Digital 1 year after the model was released. The price was great and so the performance (although I didn’t like the software on the drive, so I removed it).

Read reviews before you buy

Another reason for buying late is that you can read reviews on them. I would disregard emotional reviews, the type that says: “I will never buy this crap again”. Perhaps the reviewer was unlucky and bought a Monday morning piece or his/her computer configuration was not set up for this type of hardware. You can never tell, but an emotional review is not helpful in most cases. Instead, look for a balanced review, one that shows the positive and negative sides.
Many problems, especially the ones where the computer doesn’t recognize the hardware, has to do with the configuration of your computer. It often helps to check user forums to solve the problem.

Here is a great article on hard drive comparison so that you can make an informed choice on what type of hard drive you need for your situation.

Watch for my upcoming article on solving hard drive problems. Many hard drives appear to be dead but aren’t. Often you can recuperate the data on your hard drive and there are ways to avoid problems. Stay tuned!

Since MiracleTutorials.com is about video- and podcasting, I doubt I will have blind visitors but I do accommodate for screen readers up to a point because it is only polite to do so (blind visitors can visit my site by accident, for instance). Apart from that, it enhances your ranking in Google (an ulterior motive, I confess).
Jacob Nielsen, the self-proclaimed usability expert was a big supporter of Google from the start and he advised them to give priority to sites that accommodated for the WAI 505 accessibility rules priority 1, which pretty much covers what you can see in the article above.
Luckily, WordPress makes it easy to accommodate for accessibility, so I don’t have much work to do. The “Read more >>” you see in most blogs is not used very often in WP sites, instead, the title of a post is the link, so that poses no problem as it describes clearly what the link is about.

Some conflicts of interest:

For blind visitors, having the links on the right is more convenient, but putting your most important links on the right is confusing to most regular readers, so I prefer to use the navigational SKIP link (as suggested in the article) and keep links on the left and top.
I use the right hand side of the site for attention grabbers, like special announcements and temporary links and I think most marketing gurus agree with that approach, because readers behave in certain ways and it would be foolish not to keep that in mind. There are many studies on eye tracking movement that confirm this approach.

About new windows:
I agree that it can be confusing to open a new window for an external link, not only for blind visitors. But on the other hand, you do not want visitors to move away from your site, do you?
So, again there is a conflict of interest here. The solution to the problem, is to add a title tag in your link where you say something like: “This opens in a new window”. I use this technique all the time because I find it annoying myself to be confronted by a new window while not knowing about it. The code to use goes like this:
<a href=”http://the-external-link” title=”This opens in a new window”>the external link</a>
Where “the external link” is of course the link to the external site. Move you mouse of this link to see what I mean. You should see a message popup, saying: “This opens in a new window”. Older browsers do not support this feature, but screen readers will find certainly this message, thus the disabled visitor is warned upfront. It is certainly not ideal for them, but from the perspective of the site owner, it is a necessary evil.

Issues with external services:
To name one: Aweber.com is a great service for aggregating subscribers and automated newsletters, but their forms are actually bad for screen readers as they do not provide proper labeling and on top of that, they use table cells. So, if you have blind readers, use the html version of the forms instead of the javascript version, because then the forms can be modified as you like.

Test your site:
See how your site appears on a screen reader. Lynx is a screen reader that you can download to test how your site will work. http://lynx.isc.org/lynx2.8.6/index.html
It’s bit awkward to work with in the beginning but you get used to it. Click on lynx2-8-6.zip – the distribution file.

A (probably controversial) observation on the article above:

Saying that your site should be simple and not use any fancy stuff is a ridiculous notion if you think about it. It’s like saying to a painter: “Don’t use blue and green together”. Or actually, what is says is that you should not paint at all.
Technology has a lot to offer and it would be a waste to hold back on that for the sake of some browser vendors who refuse to do some serious effort for the disabled. Site owners should certainly do their bit, but many problems can be avoided if browser vendors would anticipate typical situations. They all should agree on a standard set of shortcut keys for typical functions like text enlargement, for instance. It cannot be that hard to detect when a new window will open and just tell the user when that happens (if they indicate that in the Preferences panel).

If you are planning to do interviews or film at other locations as well, buy a stand alone camcorder with a mini-tripod because they are often better quality, and they give you much more options related to color settings, focus, sharpness etc.. and… you can still use them with a teleprompter. It will need some practice to get the camcorder in the right angle, but after some tests, you’ll get the hang of it.

Monitor webcams have a lower quality generally and you cannot change the angle in which they record events. Thus, they are severely limited in their options, but again, consider what you want to do: if you are an entrepreneur and the only thing you want to do is to address the public personally without the need to show yourself top to bottom, a monitor webcam is fine and easy to work with. No fiddling, no hassle. You can always upgrade later on if you feel like it. Some of those webcams (Logitech) have a little motor so that the webcam can follow you as you move from left to right but I would not recommend this type of gadgets because in most cases, it will give undesirable results.

Some advice on teleprompting

Use it to prompt when you forget your text. It is a bad idea to read everything you want to say because it will get noticed. Instead, practice and learn the text you want to say by heart. The teleprompter then will be a great companion to remind you when your mind goes blank.
Video casting and videoblogging is all about being perceived as sincere and looking natural. Your first videos undoubtedly will be a bit studied and forced, but it will be surprising to discover how quickly you transform from a nervous wreck into a natural speaker if you learn to memorize your texts.

VlogIt (bought by Adobe) has a very useful teleprompter. It only costs $29 USD and you can even record videos, including green screening, so this is real value for money. It is not sure what the plans of Adobe are with this software, so I wouldn’t wait too long to buy it.