A picture paints a thousand words. But a video, now that’s even better! Most blogging services, like Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, and even the latest versions of standalone WordPress installations (which you install on your own web hosting service) has built-in photo uploading features. But built-in video-hosting solutions are not as common.
Even if some blog services such as Multiply (blogging-cum-social networking) have video-hosting solutions, most would not have video streaming, meaning your readers would still have to download the video and play it on their computers. A problem: your readers may not always have the same systems and software–some would be running Windows, for instance, while others Apple Mac OS. Others might even be using Linux. Some would have Quicktime, but some would still have to download this (quite a big download). Some may have Windows Media Player, but most Apple users might not have this on their systems.
The solution: third-party video hosting services. One of our favorites is YouTube. What’s great about this service is that you can play videos off your Web browser itself, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or other standard browsers–the only requirement is that you have Macromedia Flash Player. And who doesn’t have Flash these days? It’s practically built-in with most browsers.
So how do you incorporate videos on your blog posts with YouTube? Simple. Just upload your video to YouTube (account sign-up may be required), and then YouTube will give you a snippet of code, which you then paste into your blog entry. Or you may also embed existing videos from other YouTube users.
Remember to use the “Embeddable player” option.
Here’s a sample video embedded from YouTube:
Video-blogging has never been easier.
Originally posted on November 4, 2006 @ 6:12 pm
