Evidently, you can't get to YouTube from China:



Some of the videos on YouTube have been deemed unsuitable for viewing by minors. Because after all, what we do to each other isn't obscene, but watching video or looking at pictures of it is. If we teach our children how horrible war is, how will we convince them to die for us in the next one?

In the last month, China has ranked number six in terms of visits to SocialEdge.org, behind the U.S., India, the UK, Canada, and Australia, with the most visits coming from Beijing. So yes, it seems that you can read Social Edge in China, but you can't watch YouTube videos, so I guess no X-Interviews. Somehow, I don't think the X-Interviews are the most important thing they're missing out on.

Last year the U.S. blocked soldiers in Iraq from YouTube and 11 other sites as well, citing bandwidth concerns. Yay freedom, woo-hoo. There's always a perfectly "legitimate" excuse available when you want to quash dissent and stifle speech, be it in Tibet, Baghdad or your living room.

We have comments on Social Edge, though we don't see them used that much outside of our weekly discussions. This holds true even when we have content that is a bit more, for lack of a better word, provocative. Recently we published an X-Interview with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. We haven't had a single comment on the site to this post. You have to be a logged in member to be able to post a comment, but still, I was surprised to see that there wasn't a single comment responding to what the former president had to say.

The same video is posted to YouTube, where comments are a different story. At this time, there have been 38 comments on YouTube. The comments have not, however, been a shining example of considered cognitive discourse, and have instead veered off into insipid insults and argumentative posturing. With all the knuckle dragging you would think the video was a prolonged insult to neanderthals. Alas, I don't know that any of the comments related to the content of the video at all, instead merely focusing on supporting or debasing the subject of the video, Mr. Carter.

Oh, how I would have loved to read a discussion concerning the eradication of guinea worm and other diseases! If it devolved into a political discussion with an intelligent back and forth on the pros and cons of habeus corpus restrictions, that wouldn't have been terribly disappointing either. Instead, people have used the comments to call President Cater an "ass," a "son-of-a-bitch," a "fool", a "senile old bastard" - you get the picture. We're not reaching Lincoln-Douglas level of debate on this one.

I have to admit, while reading the comments I was tempted to delete most if not all of them and close down further comments on the video. YouTube allows you to set your comment options thusly:



Ultimately, what people want to say is up to them. Sometimes, however, what goes unsaid is far more interesting than what is shouted, screamed, hollered or typed.

Is your business a 501(c)3? If so, Google has something free for you.

Google Checkout for Non-Profits is free through 2008, and allows you to collect donations on your site quickly and easily. They have also wrapped it up with their YouTube offering. Depending on what they charge for the service you may not want to use it in 2009, but until then, there's no good reason not to take advantage of it now. Then you can add a little box like this to your site:



No, we're not taking donations here on the Edge. That's just a screenshot, an example of what it will look like on your site. Chocolate, however, is always accepted around these parts. Mmm, chocolate. But food products are harder to send over Cat-5 and wi-fi than donations via Google Checkout.

Revver and Brightcove and Blip, oh my!

So many video upload services and so few hours in the day. How to choose which one to upload your videos to? And why?

Along with the services mentioned above, you could also use Yahoo!, Google, MySpace, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion in order to share your videos. And, of course, who can forget the $1.6B behemoth of the business, streaming their users' videos to computer screens, AppleTVs and iPhones everywhere, YouTube. (There are more, of course, but for the purposes of today's discussion, we'll stick with these.) If you are looking to plop your videos onto your own page any one of them will do so, with varying degrees of quality and ease.

If you're want to share your videos with as many users as possible, you might choose YouTube for the size of its audience, and risk getting lost among the dancing on treadmills and the ubiquitous hand-holding otters. You might have a better chance of breaking through on one of the smaller, less used sites. But why should you settle for just one? Well, because uploading videos to 9 different sites is a long, drawn out bore.

Thankfully, there's a site with an answer to what ails you, or at least what has been ailing me. TubeMogul allows you to store your login information for nine different video sharing sites and submit your video to all of them at once.

This week's X-Interview is the first video I've tried this with, and if the results are good, I'll go back and upload the previous X-Interviews (All 35 of them! Yikes, it may take me a bit of time even nine sites at a time!).

It takes a bit of time, but I've been writing this while letting the uploads run their course over in another browser window. Let's see what the results look like. I'll skip YouTube since that's what we've been using for the X-Interviews for a while now.

Yahoo!:


MySpace:


MetaCafe:


Google:


Revver:


DailyMotion:


Blip:


Brightcove:
Still waiting.

Not a process for the impatient, that's for sure. Still, a much less odious task than uploading them all one by one to each site. It is interesting to note the differences between the services, how they handle widescreen video (or don't), what kind of controller is included and what initial image is displayed. A lot is a matter of taste, but load time is the most important thing. You would hate to have users try to play a video and leave because it takes too long to load.

Options for captions are also something to take into consideration. I worked on adding closed captions to a video over the weekend, and it was not as simple as I thought it would be. I noticed that Google Video has an option for captioning, and I've read that YouTube does as well. More on that later, as I learn more about how to make video more accessible.

We're still a little bit stunned here on the Edge. We knew that Global X had a huge following, but bigger than the President of the United States? Well, yes, it appears that he does. The X-Interviews has been at the top of the iTunes Goverment & Organizations charts since shortly after we went to press last Tuesday. George W. Bush trails X in the #2 slot with his weekly radio address.


This doesn't mean that we're planning any inaugural festivities in DC. Global X is an international sort and can't be tied down to a single hemisphere, much less a single country. Maybe if the World Bank comes a calling he'll step in and lead that august body, but for now we're keeping X on the Edge.

What it does mean is that people are interested in the stories that social entrepreneurs have to tell. It means that it is easier than ever before for you to tell your stories to the people who want to hear them.

So what does it take for you to join Global X at the top of the iTunes charts? Does it require hiring a video production staff and buying a lot of highly specialized equipment?  Does it require a plethora of technical expertise to get the podcasts feeds published?

Nope.

Camcorders can be had relatively cheap these days. HD camcorders are shiny, new, expensive toys, of course, but you just need a basic camcorder to get things rolling. The web still isn't built for hi-def, and a regular camcorder can be had for under $250. You can add a tripod for less than $30. For higher quality audio, you might want to add a microphone, but you should be able to get by without.

We use Macintoshes here on the Edge, so we didn't need to get any additional video software. Every Mac these days comes with iMovie, a more than adequate and easy to use video editing program. Windows Vista comes with Windows Movie Maker for editing your movies. Higher end packages are available for both platforms, and there are inexpensive packages available for older versions of the operating systems as well.

To create the XML feed for iTunes, as I mentioned in previous posts, you can create the code by hand, but hey, let's make this easy. Feeder is an elegant solution for Mac, and The Podcast RSS Buddy is available for Windows as well as Mac. Submit the feed to Apple, and wait to see your videos in iTunes. While you're waiting, might as well publish to YouTube as well. It's easier than sending an email to Grandma.

That's all it takes for you to join Global X on iTunes and YouTube. How many social entrepreneurs can land on the charts at once? It would be fun to find out, wouldn't it?

When we started considering relaunching Social Edge last year, we thought about launching a Social Edge Media Empire®! Radio! TV! Movies! We're very humble here on the Edge, but our aspirations know no boundaries. Sure, we're small, but we could take on the CNN's, NPR's & Sony's of the world!

Alas, then we remembered, we're a web community. We want to build conversations, not transmitter towers. The cost involved in setting up a TV station or a radio station? Astronomical. The range? Not so hot. Our audience here on the edge is global, and we want to expand that global reach, not constrain it to any one place.

Still, we knew we wanted to expand our offerings in new ways in order to incorporate audio and video. We added audio in our Peace Corps Entrepreneurs podcast series and video in Global X's series of X-Interviews. Yay! We had made a move towards being more media rich. Not an empire just yet, but hey, have you priced Colosseum sized real estate these days? Even in Second Life, virtual land is starting to gain in value.

Now, SocialEdge.org has global reach. Anybody on the internet can reach us no matter where in the world they are, government censorship not withstanding. (Is there a site out there that will tell you if your site is being blocked by a government? I would love to find one.) Still, Social Edge may be older than YouTube, but we don't get as much traffic as the average otter video does there. 5,546,204 views? 36,472 people marked it as a favorite? 7984 comments? I kid you not, this is what is more important to people than microfinance and social entrepreneurial scalability:


That's what we need here on the Edge: more videos of cute and fluffy animals! The lure of anthropomorphized aquatic mammals is the siren song of the 21st century.

So, we started our own YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/socialedge. Okay, I'll be honest, not a lot of people have visited our channels and watched our videos. Maybe we need to get a couple of social entrepreneurs to float in a pool holding hands. Any volunteers? We have a couple of subscribers thus far, but the main thing is that if you want to include an X-Interview in your blog, you can embed the YouTube code into your blog to do so. And it is free to post the videos, so if it never picks up much, we're not losing any money, just a couple of minutes each time we post a video.

For the next part of the expanding Social Edge Media Empire® we turned our attention to iTunes. As I detailed in an earlier post, I used a shareware app for the Mac called Feeder to create the XML feeds with iTunes extensions and then posted them to our site. I submitted them to Apple and we got picked up pretty quick. Peace Corps Entrepreneurs showed up the next morning, while the X-Interviews took about a week to show up. I was very impatient and emailed Apple to find out what was taking the second feed so long to get indexed! Nothing in particular, I just needed to be patient and voila! It showed up.

I had thought that it would link the two podcasts together on a single author's page, but that is something that Apple does manually if you ask them to. Our page is plain, but shows both our podcasts. Apple designs custom artist pages for the most popular podcasters, so maybe it'll be prettier someday. We've been very excited to see them rise on the charts, reaching as high as #3 & #9 on the non-profits sub-category list of top podcasts and #6 & #19 on the Governments & Organizations category. More rewarding still was to see the X-Interviews in the New Releases section of the iTunes Podcast home page.

As it turns out, it wasn't rocket science. If your organization has audio or video that you think a larger audience would benefit from than traditionally pass through your site, take a look at publishing on iTunes. It won't take long and is a small added step to your publishing process that could expose more people to your organization's purpose and mission. Just don't be too popular, okay? We like seeing ourselves listed in the top podcasts and don't need you coming in and kicking us out! Maybe in a year or two there will be enough podcasts from Social Edge members to warrant a new Social Entrepreneurs category in iTunes. Now that would be the start of a real Social Edge Media Empire®!

So, what do these three things have in common?

Oh, sure, it's easy to say that all three offer a view of a possible future, but that would be too easy. And yes, all three feature an air of mystery about them. What is Year Zero and its web campaign all about? What were they thinking making a prequel to Star Trek? (Oh, they're doing it again? *sigh*) Who is Global X?

Still not the answer I was looking for, but wow! I never realized that NIN, Star Trek and Social Edge had so much in common! And this week, all three are new on iTunes, where our Peace Corps. on the Edge series of podcasts can now be found. With a little bit of luck, you might also be able to see the X-Interviews there as well by the time you read this. If not, they are available over on YouTube all tagged up and ready to be linked to in your blog, if you so desire.

If you have your own podcast and want to publish it in iTunes, you pop the feed url in here and Apple reviews the feed before publishing. A standard XML feed works okay, but iTunes has it's own custom extensions that you'll want to include as well. If you're a Mac use, there's an app called Feeder from Reinvented Software that even gives you a preview of what your feed will look like in iTunes. I'm sure there's something similar for Windows as well, or you can add the extensions by hand in your text editor of choice.

Now if only there was a Star Trek/NIN video mashup to wrap things up... ah! Here it is:

I have been using Netvibes for a while now to keep up with blogs, Flickr accounts and the like. One of the modules I have set up is a Flickr image search for photos tagged with Social Entrepreneur. Most of the time, it is a very quiet, placid little module, but last week I was treated to a bunch of new pictures.


Mr. Fruchterman took copious photos at the Skoll World Forum. I'm going to have to get a camera recommendation from him. A lot of really super shots on his Flickr. The Berkeley Bottom Line crew were among those he spotted. Global X, of course, is quite handy with a camera lens as well. I also found photos from Tom Watson and caught up with the proceedings over at the OnPhilanthropy blog, and then some more photos in the OnPhilanthropy Flickr set. Even more photos are available from Panda SF.

And if you're not keen on Real Player, there are videos from the forum up on YouTube as well.

YouTube decided to hand out awards for the best videos of 2006. In a stunning oversight, Social Edge did not win an award! Okay, granted, the only video we posted wasn't exactly the most dynamic or interesting video possible. Still, it hurts a little just the same.

Next year, I fully expect that Global X will be standing up on stage accepting the award for most inspiration video or for best series for his X Interviews from the Skoll World Forum 2007. Or at least, he would if he made personal appearances. Or if the awards were handed out on a stage. We'll post the interviews on YouTube soon, but for now enjoy them here on Social Edge.

This year's most inspirational YouTube video? Free Hugs:

Last week I talked about how to rob a bank. Okay, not really. “Bank robber” wasn’t an option for career day in high school, and with good reason. No medical benefits. Oh, and the whole it’s immoral and you’ll end up dead or incarcerated if you choose to pursue it thing. Pshaw.

I also talked about going where the viewers are. A lot more people go to YouTube than will ever go to yoursocialenterprisenamehere.org. You have videos? Pics? Podcasts? Post them to your site and post them to YouTube, Flickr and iTunes.

It’s not enough, however, to just take your current content and stick it up on these sites. Web 2.0 is all about motion. It’s all about what’s there today that wasn’t there yesterday. Posting things once might get someone to your site once, but how do you stay in their conscience? How do you lodge your message into their cerebellum?

I give you the wise words of the fox in Antoine de St. Exupery’s The Little Prince:

"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. First you'll sit down at a little distance from me - like that - in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you'll sit a little closer to me, every day…"

The next day the little prince came back.

"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If for example, you came at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is ready to greet you…”

Or in the words of another Prince:

There’s joy in repetition.
There’s joy in repetition.

There’s joy in repetition.

There’s joy in repetition.

There’s joy in repetition.

Etc. Etc. Etc. (And yes, I realize that pulling lyrics from an obscure album track off of the soundtrack to Prince’s last motion picture brings up the obvious question of why he never made another motion picture? Endorphinemachine could have been turned into a franchise with the right supporting cast. Hollywood, take note.)

Posting a single podcast to iTunes? Fine. But tell the fox that you’ll post one every Thursday and he’ll start to anticipate it’s arrival. Whatever type of content you have to post, do it on a regular basis. Don’t expect immediate results, as relationships with an audience takes time to develop.

My NetVibes Flickr module did get updated with new pictures tagged “social entrepreneur” this week, so at least one person read my blog last week. Global X. He’s always cutting edge, ahead of the pack. Soon, I hope, there will be new photos tagged social entrepreneur on a regular basis. Certainly others will follow in Global X’s bold, trendsetting footsteps, no? Certainly pics of social entrepreneurs are at least as interesting as ones of people playing with Wii?

Years ago, I was working in a bookstore that was held up. The perpetrator took a few hundred dollars and made off in his getaway car, driving past 3 banks in the parking lot. Perhaps he had never heard about Willie Sutton's reply to the question 'Why do you rob banks?' Answer: 'Because that is where the money is at.'

Why do hackers write viruses for Windows? It probably has as much or more to do with Microsoft's 90% marketshare than with the security vulnerabilities of their OS.

Why are the Beatles rumored to be putting their catalog on iTunes despite their years of legal wrangling with Apple Computer? Because iTunes is where people are paying for music online.

A 30 second Superbowl commercial this year costs $2.5M, despite all the naysayers that say that traditional TV advertising is dead or dying. Advertising revenue is declining. But the Superbowl? It's the one time a year that people watch the ads on purpose.

On the web, attention is currency and the banks are plentiful. Do you need to put your podcasts up on every podcast site? No. Your photos on every photo sharing site? Your videos on every vid-swap site? Nope. Go where the eyeballs are. You can create your own photo or video swapping social network, but you aren't going to reach an audience the size of YouTube's that way.

Take Flickr. Yes, I know, a billion things have been written about Flickr, and all of it's web 2.0 goodness. That's kind of my point. Flickr is a bank filled with the currency of attention.

I have a NetVibes module that does a search for photos tagged social entrepreneur. Most of the time it is stagnant. Very stagnant. Okay, it rarely changes. But last week I noticed that it had new pictures in it, ones that I hadn't seen and I clicked to see where they had come from.

As a result, I learned about On Road Media, " a unique and exciting organisation that provides the necessary tools for people to tell their own stories in mainstream and citizen media or podcasting." After clicking around a bit, I was led to their podcasts hosted at Switchpod. They are on iTunes as well.

Never would have heard of them if they hadn't tagged their pics and posted them on Flickr. And I never would have found them on iTunes. Of course, now they have to keep my attention, which is the second part of the equation and more difficult than the first. Take the fellow who decided to skip banks and rob bookstores instead. He left the store with more money than he had come in with, so part one of his endeavor could be considered a qualified success. He only had a short time, however, to enjoy his misbegotten reward. He had failed to plan for part two - not getting caught - and had left his fingerprints on some books that he had been browsing.

Lost in yesterday's headlines about North Korea + Nukes and Google + YouTube was another merger, that of Google + Social Edge:

Okay, this merger was strictly in my head, as I work on the design for the new Social Edge site, coming soon. Still, I envy a site design that is that simple, clean and pure.

Okay, I also envy the thought of having $1.65 Billion to play with, but let's not venture off into Fantasyland too much. $1,650,000,000. That's enough to build your own evil empire with:

As far as Google + YouTube, I have to admit that I don't quite get it. It seems to me to be an obscene amount of money to pay for something that you have already built yourself. Especially when so much of the content is of questionable copyright validity. I mean, what did Napster sell for? $8M.* What is the difference here?

Well, if I understand those kinds of questions, maybe I would have that $1.65B to play around with. Instead, I find myself wondering more and more about the advantages one finds in the social sector, where the competition that drives a company to buy up a competitor that has the same basic product simply doesn't exist. Then again, maybe I'm still suffering from an acute case of naiveté.

Still, I think that one of the interesting things that can happen in the social sector is that the different organizations supporting social entrepreneurs can excel at different parts of the puzzle and integrate our work together for the benefit of the whole sector. Utilizing a common identity system is the most obvious first step, but there are plenty of other ways for the work we do here to integrate with the work others do in the social sector.

Right now, I'm more concerned with getting the revised Social Edge site wrapped up and in your hands, and then with the inevitable clean-up that follows such a task. It'll be interesting to see how things shake up after that. More interesting than building the same things as everybody else and then trying to mash like things together like they do over in the non-social sector.

Last week I blogged about posting video to your website or blog using Google Video or YouTube. What I failed to mention was how to get the video recorded on your computer in the first place. I used iMovie on my MacBook with a built in iSight webcam, which was very simple, and allowed me to add an opening title screen without much thought. Don't worry, I'm not about to say "I'm a Mac" and how everything just kind of works out of the box. Even if it did, kind of, just work. Right out of the box.

We don't all have the latest and greatest toys from Apple to help turn us into web video stars. (And if you're of a certain age, I'm sorry if that Buggles song I included in last week's post is now playing in your head.) Some of us have Windows, Red Hat Linux or Ubuntu running on our desktops. Or even pre-OSX Macs. (Perish the thought!) I know at my house, I have a Mac that is candy colored still instead of sleek aluminum. Sure, it's older than broadband, but it works.

So, what's the easiest way to record and post video directly to the web? If you have a webcam, an internet connection, and a Flash-enabled browser, you might want to give Hellodeo a try.

Last week, Amazon unveiled their Unboxed video download service, and today Apple took the wraps off of their updated iTunes video store. Big budget studio flicks are now available for downloading onto your computer. Legally.

I'm no Steven Spielberg, so I doubt that my movies will ever show up on either service. My vacation videos just really aren't that intriguing. But let's pretend that I did have video that I wanted to share with the world. It doesn't need to be a slick, professionally produced movie in order for you to share it with your audience on your web site or blog in order to enhance the message you want to get across to your audience.

YouTube is the most talked about video service out there that allows you to share your videos with the world. They have a nice disclaimer on their upload page that a lot of people seem to be ignoring:

Do not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts, or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself.

Which is why you can find plenty of copyrighted material on the site. I'm not above tracking down music videos from my MTV-influenced childhood:



But I only get sucked into the viral marketing campaigns once they're revealed as such:



So how hard can it be to upload a video to the site and share it out to you legions of adoring readers?



Not that hard. Granted, making the video attractive can be difficult, but once you have the Quicktime or MPG file, getting it up on YouTube is a snap. You need to create a user account, verify your email address and then upload your file along with a title, description and some tags or keywords to help others find your video. The above video is tagged SocialEdge. In order to put the video onto your site or blog, there is a string of code provided for you to copy and paste into your site. The video sits on the YouTube site allowing you to save on hosting and bandwidth costs.

So what other options are there? How about Google video?