It's a Free World After All

I used to send newsletters monthly to my subscribers of my Creative Thinking and Innovation web sites. They are www.slyasafox.com and www.systematic-idea-generation.com. For some time now, I have been kicking around the idea of doing something different with the newsletters. I wanted to do a “Video Newsletter”, a 2 minute or so video that describes one of the tools I teach in workshop or just some interesting story about Creativity and Innovation.

But I am not a technology guru (although lately I am starting to feel a little more like a nerd) so the whole video thing started to scare me a little. So I decided to do some investigation and see what I could learn. I discovered a few months earlier that editing video from a technical point of view is a whole lot easier that I thought it was. For those of you that don’t know, Windows Movie Maker II is already on your computer for free if you have Windows XP. Just look under “Programs” and “Accessories” on your computer.

Also I bought Pinnacle Studio 9 http://www.pinnaclesys.com for about $70 which is really cool as well.

Now I didn’t really know anything about blogs, so I started there. I went to www.blogger.com and set up a simple site. Ironically I picked the same template Paul uses for this Innovation Commons. My site is http://slyasafox.blogspot.com don’t pick on the site, it’s just a test to see if I can figure out this whole video thing.

Now here is the really cool thing. Are you ready? I found you can store all of the text, pictures, music, and VIDEOS you want on the internet for free!

Here is the story. I was doing some research on video blogging and found the web site www.rocketboom.com. (for the guys out there, she is not too bad on the eyes either). Rocketboom is one of the most popular videoblogs on the internet.

I asked Amanda about videoblogging and how to get started. She told me to go to http://www.freevlog.org/ and watch the tutorials. OK this guy is a little goofy, but the tutorials are a great help.

Now watching the videos I learned you can store all of you video and any other content to www.archive.org for free. I have been familiar with this site for a long time. The original intent of this site was to be the “Digital Library of Congress.” They go out and scan web sites and make a historical record of them.

They have a cute name for it, “The Wayback Machine”, you remember “Professor Peabody and his pet boy Sherman.”

This www.archive.org thing is backed by the Smithsonian, National Science Foundation, private investors and bunch of others as far as I can tell. I read that they are adding 20 Terabytes of data a month and that was a few years ago ! You can do you own research on the genesis and story behind it..

You knew you could always upload material to www.archive.org, but it was a major pain in the #%^%! And you had to be an IT guru, … = Nerd.

Not anymore.

This free interface called www.ourmedia.org allows you to upload stuff real easy. This is their tag line “We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.”

So here’s the steps to build a simple web site and upload anything you want for free;

#1 Go to www.freevlog.org and watch the tutorials. Free

#2 Go to www.blogger.com and set up a blog if you don’t have one already. It will take you 5 minutes. Free

#3 Go to www.archive.org and set up an account, again only a few minutes. Free

#4 Go to www.ourmedia.org and set up an account. Ditto and you can use the same password. You guessed it..Free.

Now just writing this article and searching for all of the web addresses again, I found a ton of other sites that talk about the same stuff. For example, this one http://creativecommons.org/ I haven’t even had time to look at it myself.

Got to go, I’ve got some more research to do.

p.s. Yes my spelling and grammar sucks, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

Mark L. Fox
Discover Something New
www.slyasafox.com