Thought it would be interesting for some other new video bloggers like me, or prospective vloggers, to share how my new Hmmcast (videoblog) quest in 2007 is going. I’ve been creating video for the web for a long time, but this year I made it a personal goal to create a new video or podcast every weekday. With two weeks in the bag, a few not so random newbie observations:

4:20pm PST / 7:20pm EST for each Hmmcast
It was important for me to have a daily updated date/time when each new Hmmcast was posted. I decided upon 4:20pm PST each day. It doesn’t seem to be a requirement for every video blogger to have a designated time when they post each new work, but for me, it created a clear deadline each weekday rather than something more arbitrary like “when I get it done.” I’m not certain if I’ll be able to make this deadline every weekday in 2007, but if I should miss one here and there, I’ll still have time to get the work published by the end of the day.

Still a minimum of 30 minutes to product and publish a couple minutes of video
These vloggers who just point, click, shoot and publish in almost real time must be video gods. In the best case it’s taken me a little under 30 minutes to publish a Hmmcast using the following steps:

1. preplanning, if any
2. recording. Usually in AVI format and then being titled and compressed down to mp4. Sometimes I can do it in one take, but for the longer works so far it’s been more like 2-3 takes.
3. editing. I’ll handle this one shortly.
4. FTP to media delivery server.
5. creating the preview screenshot
6. writing the blog post for the Hmmcast enclosure. In some cases I’ve included only a sentence or two and in others have included more background to supplement the Hmmcast along with links. I remain concerned about having almost no text because I think it makes it too hard for people using search, although a common video blog format is not to have much in the way of text or description. Rather than ruin the video — and the reason most might watch it — I try and use the text for additional commentary on the topic and/or Hmmcast itself. Not completely satisfied with this yet, but it’s developing.

Search now, search tomorrow
Searching the content within video and podcasts is still not a very well developed market. Sure, there are a couple of search engines out there which say they can do it, but from what I’ve seen the efforts aren’t very good yet. Until some search engine comes along that really can search through video, parse up what has been said and shown and then return based on keyword queries, the most logical way is for the publisher to include something around the video itself including a descriptive title and description.

This is the main reason why StumbleUpon Video doesn’t work for me. Chaining videos based on TiVO-style thumbs up/down in a collage without any other additional context or meaning is like stringing together a bunch of pictures without knowing who took them, when they were took, where they are from, etc. I can dig that level of randomness with websites, even by listening to radio, but not with video.

When I’m creating something search remains very important to me. Both for external and internal site search that I can use at a later date and time to piece together a larger work. It’s frustrating when you create something and can’t quickly locate it months or years later.

The wonders of editing
Most of my work hasn’t had much editing so far and it clearly shows. I’ve made verbal mistakes that have been published uncorrected in the video, but corrected in the text (another important way to use the video description). I’m hoping to improve my skill of editing multiple scenes and even complete videos into a single work. It would be nice to start editing out these flubs in the future.

Software
As far software for the video editing portion goes, I’ve primarily been using Visual Communicator, Windows Movie Maker and Windows Encoder (screencasts). To compress to MP4 I’ve been using Quicktime.

I’m not completely satisfied with how I’m using the PodPress Wordpress plugin. It creates a video client that doesn’t show or play in some browser environments (readers/viewers using Linux have complained, as well as IE users). Also, I must not have all the metadata right because it shows as “Your Author name goes here” instead of my name. I also don’t like how PodPress inserts messages into pages as comments (check your homepage footer, for example) even when you tell it not to. It’s possible I need to upgrade to a more recent version to fix all of this and that’s on my list, but PodPress seems like one of those plugins that tries to do too much. I’m grateful for what the author has created and given away freely, so please don’t misunderstand. Just wondering if maybe it would be better splitting up the plugin into two separate plugins that were more tightly focused: one for podcasts and the other for videoblogs. I’m sure many fans of PodPress will disagree with me, but remember these are my newbie thoughts; just haven’t seen the PodPress light yet and I definitely need to do more research and read up more on the best ways to use. In fact, thinking if the newest version doesn’t solve my concerns, I’ll stop using it altogether.

As a backup measure for the not seeing it in RSS part, I’ve also been using Google Video, but the problem there is if I upload the video to Google Video first so I can link in the post here, then before I publish the Hmmcast here, it would be available elsewhere. That screws with the publishing at a certain time deal. One possible fix is to publish initially at Google Video as “private” until after 4:20pm and then change to “public” at Google. I’d like to expand the number of places I submit the weekday Hmmcasts too other than Google Video.

Promotion
Not much promotional activity yet to report.

I just added the headline rotator for the Hmmcast from Feedburner to the single Hmm pages in a prominent location (top right sidebar). I also did some promotion when it was a weekly podcast, but that was in 2006 which helped the subscriber numbers. Finally, I signed up for the Yahoo videoblogger’s newsgroup and was accepted and will be following the basic instructions they offer about where to start. I’ll be making my first introductory videoblogger post there soon.

Haven’t broken the 2007 streak yet, 1/15 was holiday
Hmmcast will return later today and continue to have new episodes published every weekday save for holidays and vacations at 420/720. It arrives as an MP4 (video) or MP3 (podcast) RSS enclosure. For those already subscribed to the main Hmm feed and/or email it arrives along with everything else, but if you’d like to subscribe to only the Hmmcast you can use this RSS feed. As always, thank you for reading, listening and watching.

Now it’s your turn. Any early thoughts, suggestions, tips, tricks, anything that would help me improve my videoblogging efforts?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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