Adventures in youtube
At this point I haven't update this blog for about 6 months and this post stands as a 'What I've been up to' report.
"Pass me my branded baseball cap!" AKA corporate blogging
Over the summer I did a bit of corporate blogging for my employer, HPE Aruba, on their Airheads site. I edited a few blogs and had one published, Repeat after me, BGP is not scary
It shouldn't come as a surprise that this style of blogging has the ying-yang elements of instant readership and engagement, versus not being author, editor, publisher of your own work. The positives outweigh any downside though, I'll be doing some more pieces in the near future.
Adventures in youtube
The major factor in the lack of posts here has been because I've been composing and submitting videos on youtube to a channel run as a collective by a group of colleagues. Previously I was writing blogs as the primary source of information then running the demo in a vid posted to youtube, but recently I've just been letting the vids stand by themselves.
Behold some of my offerings:
BGP In depth - a playlist looking at BGP in, erm, depth.
This style of content creation, again, has positives and negatives.
Positives
Youtube itself
Youtube tools for creators are fantastic, real-time analytics, in-site editing, they really have their act together.
Huge audience
The viewing figures are low in comparison to other youtube videos, but the viewing figures reveal a wide, potentially huge, audience for every video. It is a buzz to watch the viewing figure increment and see that some guys over the other side of the world are digging your content.
The future
I've seen some articles that say the only thing in media nowadays is video. I can testify that I use youtube for all kinds of things, but especially educational. Video how-to's have helped me out greatly over the years and it feels good to be giving something back. Plus, it seems like a TV schedule is a thing of the past, people watch videos when they want, and some of these younger types get a lot of their entertainment from youtube. It certainly feels like video is only going to become more important in the future, whether that be youtube or some other video site, learning to put together videos has been a rewarding experience.
Negatives
Making videos
Man, it can be frustrating. Rather than just writing and editing, there are all the technical aspects to take into account. I do screen recordings while narrating in real time then edit it down. Even a short 10 minute video can take most of the day to record. Background noise, spelling mistakes in video slides that you don't notice until the end of the recording, fluffing your lines, these are non-issues with blogging but can have you tearing your hair out when trying to record a video.
Not always the best platform to deliver info
For very technical details or complex ideas, video is a tough platform to deliver a message. A few times I've thought to create a short explanation at the top of the video to set the scene for the main event of the vid, a demo, only to find that to try to deliver all the points I want to cover, I've done 10 minutes of talking. I find when reading I can skim through it easily to find what I'm looking for, or a least get the gist of the article by looking ahead then deciding whether to read the whole thing.
Sure, with video viewers can skip ahead, but they can just as easily watch something else. That naturally leads to an approach that tries to grab the attention of the viewer in the first few seconds. I see it with a lot of popular youtubers, the videos have a big intro, then some line about 'let's get right into it!'.
In the quest for more likes, views and subscribers, the working of the platform and retaining those eyeballs for watch time stats can cloud your thoughts on what content to present and how to deliver it. Good old text blogging is a much purer form of delivering information, to me anyway.
Those are my thoughts on a very foggy, autumnal looking morning. I'm not exactly sure how things are going to play out, but I'm determined to keep producing content and giving back to the networking community in some form or another.