Thoughts on Blogging – Video Blogs

For the past month, I’ve been experimenting with doing a weekly video blog post. The goal was to see if doing a video blog would allow me to spend more time writing fiction and working on Isaac’s and my tabletop games, rather than writing blog posts.

While doing video blogs is certainly fun (I enjoy reading the stories aloud), it doesn’t necessarily speed up the blogging process. Since I’ve just started learning how everything works (the Youtube editor, Premiere Pro…), it actually takes longer. Combine this with the tendency for the computer to take a while to upload the videos, and for Youtube to process the edited video once I’ve finished making edits, this takes time.

For example, I actually did create a video for last Friday. By the time I got it loaded, however, it was already early Saturday. And once I started to edit it on the Youtube editor, I realized that the blog portion was very rambly– the result of trying to rush. So, rather than uploading a rushed video while I was half-asleep, I decided to write this post today, and I plan to upload the video blog on Monday (I’ll be reading chapter two of Magic’s Stealing).

Based on my results thus far, I’m considering trying to do the video blogs earlier in the week. That way I could set up the video during the weekend, then schedule it to release on whichever day works best.

The biggest challenge of scheduling blog posts is discipline. If I plan for a Monday update, I’ve got to remember to make the video early in the weekend, that way I have time to upload it. For each blog–at least ones  where I do a reading–I need to practice the reading, do the reading, edit the reading, and then piece together the reading and the “blog” portion of the video.

So that’s the quick update for today. 🙂