(8/2011 Note: this was regarding one of my older channels on youtube. It was kind of a downer period for me. That channel is no longer around. I do have my current one up, but in some ways I share the same sentiments with how youtube runs things. Take it for what it is worth.)
For the past few months I have put a lot of thought into this. I started my main youtube channel a few years ago as another aspect to support this blog with videos. In its own way it worked by itself, and a lot of people have subscribed to it independently of this blog just because they enjoyed what I was doing on my main channel.
My original videos were partly experimental. It was sometime before last summer that I started to figure out what I really wanted to do. I think the high point was during last summer where I was cranking them out about once a week for about three months. I really enjoyed doing that at the time.
That was then, this is now. Youtube has changed a lot in my view over the past few years. They have had to take into consideration of being sued by various people and companies over what is put on their site. This is typical of almost anything that evolves on the internet. I mentioned this issue back in January because it was never really a surprise to me regarding restrictions, etc.
That is one thing, but my problem is I am just not enjoying putting up videos anymore. It takes a lot of time and mistakes to jump through all the hoops to get it right on youtube. Then after a few weeks I look at what I did and wonder why I put it up. There was a period a month or two back where they were supposedly getting rid of HQ quality which did not make any sense. I think it is back to normal now, but the way they handled it with their minimal explanations left a lot of us in the dark for a while. Also, me trying to keep up with the technology is all related to this.
Finally, there are a lot of sane and creative people on youtube. Then again, there are A LOT of screwballs on there. I am not a real fan how they have set up the way people do comments on there. To really say anything of substance you need a lot more than the small boxes they give you. Otherwise, you get bumper sticker epistemology (lol...I just made that up). Apart from a few videos, I pretty much disabled comments with the strategy that if someone really cared to put some thought into something they would have to have the smarts to come to the blog to do it.
So, the "bad news" is that, as of this blog, I am going to stop putting up videos on youtube. The only possible exception is if I feel differently during the summer months I might put up the last few videos I had ready to go for the subscribers on there. However, right now, it is time for a change, and I am fine with it. For the time being I will keep up the channel. I will probably continue to log in and use it for my own purposes. At some point I may take it down altogether. If there is some video(s) you want from my channel then I suggest you use something like http://keepvid.com/ to save them on your hard drive.
The "good news" is that I think I am free to do other things for this blog that were taking most of my time with youtube. There are some of my other adventures from about a year ago that I just put off because I was not sure if I wanted to wait for better video footage. Now I do not have to worry about that. If I get the desire to do videos again it will be on another site, and it will have to be done differently than the old way I was doing on youtube.
My next blog will show a movie location where it is not so pretty due to housing. Stay tuned...
