Last year I was fortunate enough to go to Internet Librarian in Monterey California.  It was Halloween, so my family came along too, and we discovered via a local bartender that the place to go trick-or-treating was “Candy Cane Lane.”  It was awe-inspiring.  Thousands of trick-or-treaters, and almost every house was decorated like crazy.  That was one highlight of the conference for me - the other, more library-related one was a pre-conference workshop with David Free and David Lee King regarding podcasting and videocasting.  If you’re attending the conference this year, it appears that they’re on the program again.  It was this workshop in 2007 that started the thought process that eventually led to the One Minute Critic - my video blog of short book reviews.  So far we’re at around 140+ book reviews, and only half are me - the rest are other library staff and members of the public.

Now, on to the subject of this post:  a video hosting site (like Youtube) called blip.tv.   Blip.tv doesn’t have as big a user base as YouTube, but it does have a lot of other interesting things that I like.  For example, you can add a Creative Commons license to your videos when you upload them.  My favorite thing about blip.tv is that you can easily cross-upload and cross-post your video as part of your initial upload.  In case that sounds like I’m speaking a different language, let me explain.  When you upload a video to a site that hosts videos, like Youtube or Blip.tv, it takes a little bit of time - anywhere from a minute on up to five or ten minutes, even on a fast connection (it all depends on the size of your file).  Once you have it there, you can manually cross post the video in a variety of ways, either linking to or embedding the video in different places.  If you have to do this manually, for every video, it can take up more time going to each site and performing the functions needed to do that.  At blip.tv, you can set things up so that whenever you upload a video, that video is simultaneously uploaded to other locations, and posted about in still more locations, thus saving a bunch of time.

As you can see, I can send the video to my video blog, tag it in del.icio.us, send a tweet, send a MySpace Bulletin, a Facebook Action, and cross-upload to the Internet Archive.  These are just the things that I picked, but there’s a big long list of other options.  The one drawback is that you can’t cross-upload to YouTube, so i still have to upload the video twice every time i want to put it online - once for blip.tv and once to YouTube - YouTube is the most used video sharing site out there, so I’m going to put the videos there (also, the YouTube player seemed to work better when embedded in our library website).  If you’d like, you can also view my account on blip.tv - if you want to compare the look and feel of blip vs. youtube, for example.