Carolyn Elefant of My Shingle fame and Nicole Black of Sui Generis — a New York law blog have both started doing “video minues” on their respective blogs.
Carolyn has her first one up on her great blog, Offshore Renewable Energy Law Blog. Nicole has a series of them up under the Category, NY Minute.
What is great about this is both are Solo’s. They are both using the blog and the internet to carve out a niche in their practice areas. Carolyn has made a challenge to all of us to try doing this ourselves.
If there are others of you doing this, please post a comment to this post with a link to your blog videos. I have an idea and will explore it further once I see what the response is.
I have not done this yet, but I have been working toward it. My daughter posts homemade videos on her blog and tells me how easy they are to create. You do have to, for example, just address the camera straight on. It is not that difficult to use pictures and video to create such a video. You can even create an interesting into. I have been following Carolyn Elefant's channel on YouTube and saw the video even before she posted it. I am not sure why NY Minute uses Google Video instead of YouTube. It has a nicer feel I think, but she has a sizing problem. She needs to adjust to code when she embeds the video so that it has a finer profile and does not intrude on her other column. Apart from this uploading and embedding are relatively simple. Of course I do not know about putting my ugly old puss on the screen. Nicole and Carolyn are much better looking than me. I do not know how I would compete. Maybe I can wear a mask.
Chuck — We all hope you wear a mask. Seriously, for anyone doing what Carolyn and Nicole are doing, please post comments here. I have an idea that I will discuss further after I see the numbers.
To answer the question posed above re: the use of Google video, I use it because with my particular camera, You Tube causes the audio and video to be out of sync. And the easiest way (and the cheapest–who wants to buy a new camera) to fix it was to use Google video instead of You Tube. I did a fair amount of WWW research and learned that it's a common problem that is encountered with my particular camera. I'll look into re-sizing the video for this Fri's NY Minute.
I'm definitely planning to add this feature to one, if not all three, of my blogs (two practice blogs in addition to Inspired Solo). Still in the "researching how to do this on a shoestring" mode – Grant, would the built-in camera on the Mac work for this purpose?
Grant, As you saw from my video, my new trusty Mac was by my side. The Mac's built in movie maker makes it fairly easy to create a professional looking video, which is why I chose it. I am looking forward to using my Mac to build even more sophisticated videos and movies.
For my video, I use the $99 Pure Digital camera which plugs directly into my computer for download, but I am looking to a better quality camera with a remote control and microphone so that I can improve the sound and not have to spend 10 takes adjusting the position. I also have trouble figuring out when I am looking directly into the camera because the lense is so small.
When I redo my website (I'm still light years behind technologically) it is my intention to do my "Tip of the Week" in this format. Of course, Chuck is prettier than I am!
In regard to doing this on a "shoe string budget"–I use my Canon Elph camera. It's a regular camera with the capacity to take 3 minute long videos. My videos come out decent, although it sounds as if I have a sybilant S and I don't, but I do have to reach forward to turn the video on and off. I could have someone else do that, but it would be impractical at this point for me.
As for others doing this–I haven't seen it yet, but you never know.