Re: [videoblogging] My Story
://surag.blip.tv From: David Jones david.jo...@altium.com To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thu, June 10, 2010 8:38:40 AM Subject: [videoblogging] My Story Ok, I'll lead by example as I normally do, here is my video blogging story: Hi, I'm Dave Jones from Sydney Australia. I started a niche electronics engineering video blog in April 2009. http://www.eevblog.com and http://www.youtube.com/user/EEVblog I wanted to differentiate myself from boring text blogs, and figured it would be fun to have a regular video blog about electronics. As far as I could tell no one else had ever attempted one, so I gave it a go with a crusty old 320x240 webcam in my study. No script, no idea, no name, I just did a talking head blog and reviewed a few products. I knew the result was crap, but I posted it on my personal Youtube channel and announced on an electronics Usenet group anyway figuring you have to start somewhere. I had some positive feedback and advice from the few dozen views I got, like ditch the study and film it in my lab. I also asked for name suggestions. The 2nd one was in the lab and was greeted with more positive feedback. I switched from the webcam to my old Canon MV700i PAL DV tape camcorder with internal mic. By the 3rd or 4th episode I had a basic Wordpress blog page with embedded Youtube videos on my personal website. Still no script, no idea, and no name. I could not come up with a better name, so it remained the Electronics Engineering Video Blog, or EEVblog for short. I would later figure out that name and branding can be quite important to get right up front! I was kind of lucky in this respect, EEVblog now works well for me as a brand. I also switched to a dedicated Youtube channel. It soon became clear that it was slowly gaining in popularity, and I experimented with various audio and video settings. I also realised that a lot of people were finding me via Youtube searches, and it was important to have a dedicated topic for each episode instead of the mixed bag of stuff I had in each blog. i.e. people didn't want to sit through 5 minutes of other stuff to get to the topic they found on the search. That was an important change I thought. I soon got complaints that I didn't have my own domain name, so I got eevblog.com and moved the Wordpress account over. At this point I had a name, a brand, a slogan (An off-the-cuff video blog about electronics..), and a silly photo people recognising the blog by. I came to realise how important sound was to a blog, so a I bought a cheap $50 2nd hand DV tape camcorder which had an external mic input and got a $30 shotgun mic. This got rid of the tape noise and improved the blog a lot, made it much more watchable. I was still shooting in 640x480 and experimenting with widescreen. I was using VideoStudio X2 edit software and was limited to the 10minute Youtube limit. Many of my blogs were in two parts because of this. Lots of heavy editing required to fit inside 10 minutes sometimes! I was not advertising the blog in any way but it seemed to just keep growing with people finding me by Google or Youtube searches. Somewhere along the line I added some Adsense text ads and they started to work like they had on my other web sites at the time. I also added a user BBS style forum and that has really taken off. Almost 1200 members, over 7000 posts and 600 topics. The EEVblog has really turned into a quite a decent user community. By Blog #42 I switched to a Sanyo Xacti HD-1010 camcorder and started to shoot in HD as Youtube now supported HD content. This blog was a turning point because it went semi-viral with 40,000 hits in a day or two via Boing Boing, and then Youtube emailed me an offer to become a Partner. That took a month or so, and then I had ads on my Youtube videos, and no more 10 minute limitation. Editing HD was much slower than SD, but I persisted (and discussed this on this group) and it is now working pretty well, I edit directly on the 1280x720 MP4 files from the Xacti camera. I have since switched to VideoStudio X3 edit software and render in 1280x720 MPEG2 which I then convert to 1280x720 MP4 with Handbrake which is uploaded to Youtube. Somewhere along the line I got the PodPress plugin for Wordpress and started producing at first a 320x240 podcast version but then switched to a 480x272 16:9 widescreen version. I came to realise how important it was to get listed in iTunes and have a podcast version and an RSS feed (via Google Feedburner). About a 1/3rd of my audience now watch via the podcast version. The rest of my audience are split about 50/50 between Youtube subscribers and my Wordpess blog. I also do an MP3 version for my drive time blogs that many like to listen to instead of watching the video. I experimented with a live show and Ustream, and once I get over a few technical hurdles, that might be a regular fixture too. I had at least 70 people tune in to my first live chat session, not sure how many
[videoblogging] My Story
Ok, I'll lead by example as I normally do, here is my video blogging story: Hi, I'm Dave Jones from Sydney Australia. I started a niche electronics engineering video blog in April 2009. http://www.eevblog.com and http://www.youtube.com/user/EEVblog I wanted to differentiate myself from boring text blogs, and figured it would be fun to have a regular video blog about electronics. As far as I could tell no one else had ever attempted one, so I gave it a go with a crusty old 320x240 webcam in my study. No script, no idea, no name, I just did a talking head blog and reviewed a few products. I knew the result was crap, but I posted it on my personal Youtube channel and announced on an electronics Usenet group anyway figuring you have to start somewhere. I had some positive feedback and advice from the few dozen views I got, like ditch the study and film it in my lab. I also asked for name suggestions. The 2nd one was in the lab and was greeted with more positive feedback. I switched from the webcam to my old Canon MV700i PAL DV tape camcorder with internal mic. By the 3rd or 4th episode I had a basic Wordpress blog page with embedded Youtube videos on my personal website. Still no script, no idea, and no name. I could not come up with a better name, so it remained the Electronics Engineering Video Blog, or EEVblog for short. I would later figure out that name and branding can be quite important to get right up front! I was kind of lucky in this respect, EEVblog now works well for me as a brand. I also switched to a dedicated Youtube channel. It soon became clear that it was slowly gaining in popularity, and I experimented with various audio and video settings. I also realised that a lot of people were finding me via Youtube searches, and it was important to have a dedicated topic for each episode instead of the mixed bag of stuff I had in each blog. i.e. people didn't want to sit through 5 minutes of other stuff to get to the topic they found on the search. That was an important change I thought. I soon got complaints that I didn't have my own domain name, so I got eevblog.com and moved the Wordpress account over. At this point I had a name, a brand, a slogan (An off-the-cuff video blog about electronics..), and a silly photo people recognising the blog by. I came to realise how important sound was to a blog, so a I bought a cheap $50 2nd hand DV tape camcorder which had an external mic input and got a $30 shotgun mic. This got rid of the tape noise and improved the blog a lot, made it much more watchable. I was still shooting in 640x480 and experimenting with widescreen. I was using VideoStudio X2 edit software and was limited to the 10minute Youtube limit. Many of my blogs were in two parts because of this. Lots of heavy editing required to fit inside 10 minutes sometimes! I was not advertising the blog in any way but it seemed to just keep growing with people finding me by Google or Youtube searches. Somewhere along the line I added some Adsense text ads and they started to work like they had on my other web sites at the time. I also added a user BBS style forum and that has really taken off. Almost 1200 members, over 7000 posts and 600 topics. The EEVblog has really turned into a quite a decent user community. By Blog #42 I switched to a Sanyo Xacti HD-1010 camcorder and started to shoot in HD as Youtube now supported HD content. This blog was a turning point because it went semi-viral with 40,000 hits in a day or two via Boing Boing, and then Youtube emailed me an offer to become a Partner. That took a month or so, and then I had ads on my Youtube videos, and no more 10 minute limitation. Editing HD was much slower than SD, but I persisted (and discussed this on this group) and it is now working pretty well, I edit directly on the 1280x720 MP4 files from the Xacti camera. I have since switched to VideoStudio X3 edit software and render in 1280x720 MPEG2 which I then convert to 1280x720 MP4 with Handbrake which is uploaded to Youtube. Somewhere along the line I got the PodPress plugin for Wordpress and started producing at first a 320x240 podcast version but then switched to a 480x272 16:9 widescreen version. I came to realise how important it was to get listed in iTunes and have a podcast version and an RSS feed (via Google Feedburner). About a 1/3rd of my audience now watch via the podcast version. The rest of my audience are split about 50/50 between Youtube subscribers and my Wordpess blog. I also do an MP3 version for my drive time blogs that many like to listen to instead of watching the video. I experimented with a live show and Ustream, and once I get over a few technical hurdles, that might be a regular fixture too. I had at least 70 people tune in to my first live chat session, not sure how many actually viewed and didn't participate. I decided to keep my focus on Youtube and only host there so as not to dilute my views and stats. And also I found the Youtube Adsense ads were
