On the Joys and Perils of YouTube

For want of a social aspect to my technology addiction, of late I have been recording video content and placing it on YouTube.  It has been an interesting endeavor, because it involves skills that I heretofore have never trained.  How does one look good on camera?  What does one do with one's hands?  What it the efficient way to record and edit video.  What is the right way to do lighting and audio?  It has been fun so far, largely because the videos I've recorded still look so amateurish.  That I will be able to learn and progress at something new enchants me.

YouTube is an amazing platform, and the result of untold man-years of effort. The voice recognition involved in the automatic closed captioning is impressive.

But as any graybeard GNU-ster will attest, placing you content solely in the hands of a faceless evil corporation like Google is unwise, since I am not their customer.  Their advertisers are their customers, and their users are just free content creators and a source of training data for their AI.  So, in parallel, I've been revisiting the idea of resurrecting my website.

It is a somewhat overwhelming idea for me because there are infinite possibilities.  I could (and should) just do a WordPress instance and call it a day, for that would be efficient, but, I would love to take the opportunity to learn something new.

Over the weekend, I enumerated my many sources of internet content.  So far, I've discovered

• YouTube
• Twitter
• A code blog on Blogger
• A personal website, hosted by a hosting provided, that is never updated
• Another personal website that is just a parked domain right now
• Yet another personal website, on my home PC, that is rarely updated
• A security camera

Over a weekend's pondering, I have decided that I will keep three projects, and that each of these will just be different skins on the same content.

• The true content backend -- not publicly visible -- which will be the source.  Video, images, audio will be stored in their native resolution and formats
• A website.  It will be GNU-friendly.  No weird javascript.  Video will be medium resolution to split the difference quality and download time.  Probably 720p Ogg+Theora+Vorbis.  Audio will be Ogg+Vorbis or MP3.  Images will be JPEG.
• YouTube.
• A gopher server where the 1990s will live on forever.  Video will be shrunk to 352x288 pixel MP4 or CIF-sized 3gp+h.263+AMR_NB.  Audio will be MP3.  Images will be 640x480 GIF.

I will probably end up with a LAMP instance with Python/Django or whatever because hosting VMs like that.

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In my personal archaeology, I also found these projects that are not externally visible or not working

• An instance of the never-completed telnet PupperBBS, which has no content
• A real-time chat service called Jozabad
• A shoutcast/icecast server that has been serving up the same song for who knows how long