Mario Olckers

Our very own YouTube channel, woohoo!!!

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, but we are proud to announce our very own YouTube channel, specifically for Hogsback Media Networks related content.

In trying to build up features and content for this site, one of the obvious media modalities to consider is videos of things and subjects relevant to New Media 2.0, which is Hogsback Media Networks’ primary business focus. After considering all the options and doing the cost-benefit analysis thing, it was decided to rather go the YouTube route, than hosting videos on our own server infrastructure, which would cripple our servers and chow through the bandwidth, if and when a certain item or items or posts becomes popular.

So, the solution: Registering for a YouTube account, they are owned by Google, so they have the world’s biggest and best and fastest distributed data center architecture serving up streaming videos. And it is all free! Gravy!!!!

If you have a gmail account already or using any of Google’s other services (docs and spreadsheets, calendar, maps, reader, scholar, books, etc.) you can just log in with that and start creating your YouTube custom profile, channel, favourites, tags, etc.

Do a search for videos you’re interested in, say Web 2.0 or wordpress or blogging, and you are presented with an overwhelming selection to choose from. Set up a playlist and channels: playlists are really categories and you can set up how many you need for each subheading of videos you’re interested in, e.g web 2.0, startups, technology, venture capital, photoshop, linux, blogging, wordpress, etc. Click through to go to the video itself and you are presented with a menu to Share, Add to Favourites or add to Channel or Playlist.

In such a way I built up a selection of Web 2.0 and tech startup related videos in one place, created a channel for all of it and then used the Google code generated for this purpose to host on one’s own website or blog. The interface was a bit unsuited for the main blog to integrate with, so i created a subdomain on hogsback.net, appropriately named youtube.hogsback.net. Head over there now and see what I have loaded into the channel so far; videos range from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch interviewing many of the most well-known Silicon Valley startup founders on their understanding of the term Web 2.0 to a board room session where angel investors speak of what they need to see regarding your financial projections when trying to raise startup capital.

All that and more and new videos will be added after I have chosen more that is relevant to Hogsback Media Networks and it’s clients. This is of course also part of the portfolio of value added services we can incorporate into a client’s marketing strategy. Whether you choose videos on YouTube uploaded by others and sharing and commenting on them, or whether you have your own created videos illustrating your message or brand or poduct, this is a very valuable enhancement to any brand or product and it’s marketing and PR strategies in todays New Media world.

So please head over to youtube.hogsback.net and feast your eyes

NB. Fast broadband/ADSL  connection preferable. Click on Menu and each video with a short description underneath appear in the right sidebar, use the right arrow to scroll through the selection and read the captions, then click on which ever video you want to see, and that’s it.