I just think there is an amazing amount of good educational video now available on the web. I was talking with a friend a few months back who is starting a business to sell videos online to teach simple tasks like tying a man’s tie, and other common tasks. I am not sure if you could really sell something like that with all the videos on YouTube but anyway…I can see where he was coming from. Here are some videos I found interesting.

Google Tech Talks (Google engEDU) The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less and The Graphing Calculator Story both of which are non technical but fascinating. Other good ones IMO include An Introduction to SQLite and Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

I also like Peepcode has good software engineering videos on Ruby on Rails programming. These are not free however.

I wanted to share something really incredible I found. If you’ve never visited the Internet Archives it’s a site worth visiting. I found out about this a few weeks ago. In the future everyone will have a camera and this is already changing the way news is reported. The archives has a collection of publicly contributed audio and video files some of which are very remarkable.

Checkout the amazing home videos taken of tsunami. There are films that people took on their camcorders as it was happening! People didn’t even understand what was happening. I mean who’s ever experienced a tsunami, right? Check out this video of a restaurant flooding. There are other videos of people standing on the beach as the waves come in and then you see the person taking the film turn and try to run away when they realize the danger they are in. Click here to view video.

To totally show off today, I am posting my first video blog entry. I took my handheld video camera to CTIA on Wednesday and recorded some clips. My first clip is a demo from my friend John Chaffee, President of Splash Data. In this video, John demonstrates his product SplashBlog which lets you instantly publish photos from your camera phone to an online photo blog to share with others. I thought this would be very appropriate for my first video blog. It’s a great product, and I will let the video speak for itself. Click here to view video.

How hard was this? Plenty. I attended a presentation last weekend at Webzine 2005 about video blogging which pointed me to the excellent tutorial site http://www.freevlog.org/.

What could possibly go wrong? I had immediate video compatiblity problems between the my PC and SC-X105L camera. I couldn’t get either Quicktime Pro or Windows Movie Maker to edit the AVI videos created by the camera. I downloaded numerous codecs, and diagnostic tools. Interestingly, I could view my videos just fine in Windows Media Player 10 but editing them is a different matter. After a lot of messing around (read days), and downloading stuff, I was able to get this done using Ulead Video Studio 9 which also includes a plug-in to make PSP movies in MPEG4 format. The PSP verison of the video is very cool. I didn’t get a chance yet to play with all the cool editing and mixing features of Ulead Video Studio 9.

Now, I am the media, and I can broadcast video.