I’ve never really bothered much with YouTube. Clips get sent to my Facebook superwall which I may or may not watch, and that’s about it. But the Liverpool Daily Post site is hugely popular, and I figured that I ought to at least try and understand how YouTube works – and why it works.
So I’m now a YouTuber – in fact, I’m here should anyone care – and I was surprised at how simple it was to set up. I started off by uploading a couple of videos of my cat Nyx (already a star of Qik, Flickr, this blog and Utterz) and then sent out a tentative request to friends to give me some feedback.
Then I linked to two friends already established on YouTube – Mark and Sion – and the LDP site, of course.
Then I uploaded some more videoes, and noticed that when my cat video was playing others of cats were being recommended alongside it. So I wandered off into YouTube and lost two hours of my life watching other people’s stories being played out on my laptop.
It was fascinating, although not as addictive as Qik which has the added unpredictability that comes with live streaming. I watched some Vespa-riding US eco-guy streaming in the wilderness yesterday just to see if a bear would come along and eat him. It didn’t.
But life is never simple is it? Now I want to embed Qik films I’ve taken on the N95 onto YouTube and I CANNOT work out how to do it. Honestly, social networking can be bloody hard work sometimes…
But, because you can never have too many clips of a cat playing with a tap, I’ve embedded Nyx here 😀

I started this blog with the aim of testing out different ways of telling news stories but I wasn’t sure what that would entail.
Looking at it now, it’s got so much mad furniture going on around the actual words it’s more like a small child’s attempt at communication than anything else. But you know what – I love it!
A tiny handful of people read it but it’s my blog with lots of bits and pieces I worked out how to put here myself.
And I have a lot of fun throwing things at it. I tend to start attacking things without really considering how they work; consequently a lot of the stuff here – like SpinVox and Utterz – are typical of someone telling me about a good thing they’ve discovered and me going off and messing about with it.
It doesn’t always work well for me – trying to get by Google IM and Jaiku to link up did cause the kind of brow furrows I’m going to need Botox for one day – but on the whole I enjoy the haphazard approach.
Between Qik videos, Utterz widets, Jaiku badges and little red devils there’s lots of messy things on this page. It may not look pretty, and I’m as sure as hell it’s not clever – after all, I managed to do it! – but it shows what can be achieved.
I’ve got the editor’s sign off to live stream conference on Qik as well; he’s off for a week (during which time I get to the edit the Post, yay!) and then when he gets back we will show the world how we plan the next day’s paper. I’m so excited about it – and I’d hope that we get lots of feedback from people on what we’re planning for the content.
Anyway, I’m having a great time messing around with my new toys. Colleague Toby Chapman is building his own website; that’s my next challenge…