Screencasting, Video Demos, and Youtube

I’ve been mildly obsessed recently with video demos, in particular screencasts. Here’s a screencast, for example, I just recorded to demo the latest release of the Workout of the Day iPhone App:

I mostly use Jing for my screencasts, but often Jing videos tend to get out of sync audio tracks when you upload them to Youtube for some reason. The above video CC recorded using some other software, and I just dubbed on the audio afterwards. This seemed to work pretty well, but I really wish Jing would get their act together and improve their screencast software by fixing those audio problems.

I’ve been interested in screencasting/video demos of late because videos can be far more a far more concise method of instruction than text+images—this is why one of the new features of the Workout of the Day iPhone app is video demos of each exercise. It’s also why I’ve been including video demos of how to use all the little hacks I’ve been creating lately. For SEO and mobile consumption purposes, or for those who don’t care to watch a full video and instead want to scan a post, I try to include textual instructions also, but please let me know if you find the video demos useful and I’ll keep them up.

I’m also using all the video publishing as an experiment to measure the efficacy of Youtube as a traffic driver. Since Youtube is THE video search engine, publishing anything to Youtube is effectively SEM. I’m curious to see how increased Youtbue publishing will affect traffic coming from Youtube to this blog.

P.S. If you’ve never tried Tabata interval training, get the Workout of the Day iPhone App, and try this workout: 8 Tabata Intervals Pushups, 8 Tabata Intervals Squats, 8 Tabata Intervals Pullups, 8 Tabata Intervals Situps (16 min total workout will leave you on the floor).