Weblog Entries

How-to Video Sites: Learn something new everyday

When text just doesn’t cut it and still pictures aren’t enough, video is the answer when it comes to demonstrations and instruction. That’s the concept under the new How-to Video Sites which have been appearing in the last 2 years, taking advantage of this technology in a truly Web 2.0 fashion.

Here’s a little review of my favorite ones:

Videojug: This is the first one I came across. It’s a UK based website with a large collection of quality videos, most of them professionally made by themselves. In case of more personal subjects like dating or lifestyles, many of the videos are acted by people in an often funny way while the explanations are narrated (they are also available in text).

When it comes to more specific things, sometimes they interview experts in the subject. There is content in many categories, and users can also upload their own as well.

Viewdo: This is one of the first, if not the first one that started with this new concept. At first it was like Videojug, with professionally produced content, but then they allowed users to upload their own. It has plenty of user-created videos, and a good variety of well categorized content.

5min: Got five minutes? 5min the Life Videopedia is a great offer too. It features a unique player called the “Smart Player” which allows you to do extra stuff like zooming in or putting the film in slow motion.

Some examples:

• How to be the Perfect Boyfriend on Videojug
• How to Tie a Tie (Double Windsor) on Viewdo
• How Slot Machines Work on 5min

Mixalia: My first web project

Every day new web applications are released aiming to make our lives easier, which is something you can actually see by yourself by reading any of the thousands of blogs and websites that discuss, review and create buzz around them.

As a person who enjoys reading sites like Mashable, Lifehacker or Downloadsquad, I always wondered about the possibility of making my own web application. Many of them are astonishingly complex, while others are quite simple… still I had no idea about what to do, until I stumbled upon PopUrls some time ago.

PopUrls is a well known mashup of the most popular social news websites, showing the headlines of those sites in a single page. The concept is fairly simple since it just shows part of the content from the RSS feeds that each site publishes, so I started to work on a similar website on my free time.

After a few weeks, Mixalia was finally ready. It’s in Spanish and the content focus is kind of different than in PopUrls, since it also fetches headlines from websites in several topics like general news, sports news, videogames, science, TV & entertainment, etc. On the other hand, this one is simpler than PopUrls since it lacks the interface customization options. The backend was made with the Simplepie PHP script, which makes the feed parsing job a piece of cake.

It may not look or feel like a Web 2.0 site, but some well known websites in Spanish have already wrote about it, driving some loyal traffic to the website.