Some helpful links on sharing videos

Since I have made this month's Living Out Loud Project video-based, I wanted to give you all some helpful hints on where and how to upload your video(s). Remember the deadline is Sunday May 3 at 5pm eastern and if there are at least 10 participants someone will win a Flip Mino HD camera. Check out the details for this 4th Living Out Loud Project for information on what your video should include. Flickr Recently, Flickr starting allowing anyone (free or paid accounts) to upload video! So if you have a Flickr account (which is easy to make or link to your yahoo account), you can easily upload videos that are 90 seconds/150MB or smaller. More info about video is available on their Flickr Video FAQ. Anyone can upload HD video (if you have that option) but only paid accounts have the option of HD playback.

YouTube There's a great video on how to upload items to YouTube. Like all of these web sites, you have to create an account before you can upload video, but that's easy enough to do.

Vimeo I started playing around with Vimeo a few years ago when it was first introduced (it came from the Flickr folks). Once you've created an account you can upload your video. The limits for the free account are up to 500MB a week! There's also a handy video tutorial on how to upload videos. And there is a ton of info in their FAQ. My account is still a free one on there and it suits my needs so don't feel like you'd need to upgrade to a Plus account unless you get that video bug and want more space etc.

Editing Videos If you are on a Windows machine, you can use Movie Maker to edit the video. Mac users should have iMovie on your machine by default. There are plenty of other fancier editing programs out there, but those should get you started if all you want to do is clip out some dead air or add captions etc.

Embedding Video Once you've uploaded your video, most blogging platforms allow you to embed that video using specific HTML in your entry. Look for a button or text that says "embed". If you are on LiveJournal, the embedding process is a little different since their security restrictions won't let you use those typical HTML codes. But you can still embed video within LiveJournal entries easily.

If you do not have a blog, feel free to submit your video link via email directly to me. You can use your blog or the video description area itself to elaborate on what you've created.

I'm very excited about this project and it's a challenge for me too since I'm not really sure what I'm going to talk about yet. But we still have two more weeks ahead of us to plan. Be sure to spread the word so we'll have those 10 (or more) participants and someone will win a kick ass prize! And if you run into technical difficulties, just let me know and I'll do what I can to help.