Silicon Valley Startups Using YouTube to Build Community posted by Craig Oda at Wednesday, July 23, 2008

In the last three months, I've seen a big change in the attitude that Silicon Valley startups have toward YouTube. Every few weeks, I answer questions about what companies can do with YouTube or what is required to produce, publish, and promote YouTube videos. We've completed several projects, including one for the Linux Foundation that was our first effort at a YouTube channel.

Based on our initial experience, we decided to experiment with lavalier microphones and boom microphones. Even for YouTube videos, the internal microphone did not allow us to get decent audio quality. We followed an interview style format and kept the videos to less than five minutes. The primary goal of the project was to help people that weren't attending the show get a better understanding of who some of the key people in open source were. We didn't promote the video channel aggressively.

Shelly Milam is going up to OSCON tomorrow to do a similar project for SourceForge. She'll be using a new camera. The current plan is to stick with the internal microphone until we finish more testing with external microphones. We're going to continue to use iMovie for editing.

We're estimating that the total time for four movies, including production, editing, and distribution will be eight hours.