Video has been one of the big success stories over the last couple of years – YouTube, Google Video and other services have exploded in popularity, fuelled by widespread access to broadband and social networking websites allowing video to spread virally. Most of the videos are good entertainment – most music videos and many TV clips can be found online pretty easily (much to Viacom’s annoyance) and YouTube has lead to instant stars like Bo Burnham and Lonelygirl15.
Gradually, without much attention or the glamour of celebrity, videos about all sorts of topics have started to appear on the internet. When I was looking for a new mobile phone recently, I did all the usual trooping around shops only to find they didn’t have the phones I was interested in and the staff less than helpful. But searching around the internet I found loads of hands-on demonstrations from impartial reviewers who weren’t interested in trying to sell me anything, just in showing off what the products can (and can’t) do. In the end I went for the Vodafone version of the phones shown in this unboxing video.
That’s all great, but it doesn’t help with my job – but there are videos online that do! From training courses to interviews and conference keynotes, you can find loads of technology news and information on the internet, usually for free. These aren’t just amateur productions, you’ll find leading experts doing the talking!
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Need to learn more about JavaScript? Who better than Douglas Crockford, Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo! or John Resig, author of jQuery? Talks by both are available from the Yahoo Developer Network’s YUI Theater [sic].
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If you’re into debugging Ajax interactions between browser and server (and be honest, who isn’t?!) then the essential tool is Firebug and author Joe Hewitt explains some of it’s features at the YUI Theatre.
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Not to be outdone by Yahoo!, Google have their own series of talks with titles like “How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People” by the developers of subversion and “How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters” by Google’s Chief Java Architect Josh Bloch.
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Google also published videos from their Developer Day 2007 introducing new products like Gears and Mapplets.
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D 2007 featured a very rare joint interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and you can view the video online.
I could go on for pages and pages of interesting stuff I’ve watched, most of which I wouldn’t have had a chance of seeing five years ago, but I want to give you the chance to find it for yourselves! And if web development or software engineering or API design isn’t your thing, I’m sure there’s some thing out there that is! Happy viewing!
Only problem with all this is it takes a load of bandwith to watch videos online, so you need to make sure your broadband contract gives you a big enough data allowance!
Apps are popping up aswell which let you have your favourite clips on your home page / profile page, so people can see what you endorse