Colin’s class is covering vlogs this week. I haven’t really played with vLogs, but I did recently read TechCrunch’s review of free video sharing sites, so I figured now is a good time to play with them a little bit myself.

As background, I have a Cannon PowerShut S410. It can record very brief video segments. I took a brief video of Fiona and started uploading it to the various sites.

Youtube is the oldest and most established. They convert the videos to Flash and add their watermark to the video. They take a little while to convert the video. They do a nice job of pointing out similar videos based on tags. Perhaps this is the flickr of the vlogs.

Castpost gives a nice URL and is easy to use. In a lot of ways, it feels a bit like blogger.

ClipShackwas pretty easy to use. It has a bit of video online social network, you know, Friendster or Orkut.

Dailymotion is interesting. Its agreement is in French, and many of the videos are from Europe.

Grouper remains in the ‘coming soon’ category. It also asks you to download some software, which I don’t really like doing, so I’ll check it out again some other time.

Our Media is based on Drupal (like this blog is). It is supported by groups like Bryght, SocialText, Archive.org, Creative Commons. These are some really good people, and I like what they are trying to do. Unfortunately, it remains a little slow and kludgy. For example, you need to have two different accounts set up, one at Our Media, and one at Archive.org. You need to store your archive.org password in your profile at Our Media.

revver.com has an interesting spin on it. You have to use their upload tool, which isn’t great. Then, they place an ad at the end of your video. If people click on the ad, you get paid for the click through. You have to get $20 worth of click throughs, and they have a sixty day lag. On top of that, they say the videos will only be stored ‘as long as they generate a reasonable amount of revenue’. Based on my experiences with Google Ads, I expect there will be a handful of people that make money off of their videos, but most people won’t get many click throughs and so this site probably isn’t for most people.

vSocial has a fairly clean interface. The URLs are not personalized. They take a little while to process the videos. In addition, they expect tags to be separated by commas instead of spaces. With that, I ended up generating a tag, familyfionacooking which I can’t find any way of deleting.

I also tried out blip.tv. They want people to upload their own thumbnail for the video as well as the video itself. This provides more functionality, but can be a pain.

Google Video uses a special uploading tool that you have to install. They say that they prefer MPEG4 videos, and Windows Media videos take longer to process.

I may check out a bunch of other video sharing sites later, but I think this gives a good view of my first impressions. If you have read all the way down here, and you’ve checked out any of the sites, I would love to hear your impressions.