Embedding YouTube just doesn’t cut it.

Of the tips I’ve given thus far, this is probably the most difficult to accomplish. Bandwidth and time work against you when you try to provide more than one or two options for your viewers. But it makes the experience much better, and far more accessible.

Attention spans don’t allow people to only focus on one thing at a time. You’re listening to music right now, aren’t you? The TV might even be on in the background.

We feel weird if we’re not listening to music while we’re online. We feel weird when there’s not something on the TV in the background. I’ve been trying to cut down on my TV watching (down to only about 1.5 hours a day), so having the TV screen black beside me makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t want to watch anything, but I want there to be something to watch.

When you only provide a YouTube embed for your video podcast, you’re forcing people to focus solely on it. It becomes difficult to have it running in the background while you’re trying to do other things. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if you have a video podcast, most of the your audience is using Firefox. Or, at the very least, they’re probably not running IE6. They’re used to having tabs. They don’t like having multiple browser windows open. Which means they can’t comfortably be reading websites while they’re watching your video podcast.

They need to be able to download it and watch it in their own media player.

As I said before, this causes problems for you, the producer, because you’ll have to spend time transcoding and you’ll have to spend money on bandwidth.

Providing an iTunes feed is a great start, but not everybody has iTunes and not everybody runs Windows or owns a Mac. But, at the very, very least, you should be publishing it to iTunes.

To see a great example of providing multiple formats, check out Rocketboom’s list of options for the viewer.

Revision3 offers, along with their embedded Flash player, multiple Quicktime, WMV, and Xvid encodes.

Part 2 will have helpful tips about how to provide options like these for your viewers.

I’m really sad about this.

InDigital was a fantastic program on Revision3 — one of its best. It was geeky, relaxed, and, above all, really fun to watch.

Hahn Choi, co-host and co-creator of the show, says in this episode that it’s ending because he was told by Revision3 to either relocate from L.A. to San Francisco, or end the show.

And he chose the latter.

Far be it from me to question Revision3′s decisions, but this seems a little like what G4TV did to their TechTV hosts, which has led to a network that’s more a horrible parody of real content than it is something decent to watch. But I’ll leave the ranting to others.

Co-host Jessica Corbin will be moving on to host, along with Patrick Norton, Revision3′s new show Tekzilla. Wil Wheaton is plenty busy aside from his webTV responsibilities (he’s got a new book coming out, and he’s a professional voice actor and blogger), but he’ll be contributing to Tekzilla, too.

InDigital leaves a huge gap at Rev3. No other program deals with consumer electronics like it did, and certainly not with the sense of style and humor that the InDigital team did (and certainly not with the hilarity that Wil brought).

I’m going to take my own advice and keep this post short, but you should all do yourselves a favor and check out InDigital’s last episode. I know that when you’re done you’ll go back through and watch the old ones, too.

Link.

If you only have 10 or 15 minutes (or less) of actual content, don’t stretch it. It doesn’t make it better, it only makes it longer. And you know what? That makes it worse. Don’t expect your audience to fast-forward when they’re bored. Chances are they’ll just turn it off.

If your show has a specific thing its meant to accomplish, say, a review of a film, cut out the preamble. Your audience knows why they’re watching you, they don’t need to be told what you’re about to do. Get right to the point.

I’m not saying you should cut out your witty banter. We all know that Diggnation wouldn’t be entertaining at all if it weren’t for Alex and Kevin’s brilliant chemistry. But they rarely digress far off of topic, and they’re funny while they’re talking about their subject. They’re able to cover the stories quickly and still be funny, without digressing into uninteresting subjects.

WebbAlert is another perfect example of keeping it short. In less than five minutes she’s able to cover all the news stories for the day that she wants to, and she doesn’t bore the audience with preamble or extra at the end.

In traditional still photography, framing is everything. Because you don’t have a moving image to adjust in real time, you need to capture the exact moment in a single still frame. If you capture too much visual “junk”, viewers might strain to see the subject. If your camera is positioned awkwardly, you may end up getting an image with the top of your subject’s head trimmed off.

Because of the problems involving accurate framing, photographers have long used the “Rule of Thirds” to help define the appropriate size and scope of an image and its subject. The rule is actually quite simple – if you split an image into thirds horizontally and vertically, you will have clearly defined lines that will help you arrange your picture.

As an example, let’s use this image of a refugee from Myanmar (learn more at Wikipedia) taken by David Iliff (used under the CC-By 2.0 license).

You can see if you open the full-size image how the photographer has carefully framed the image with the Rule of Thirds in mind (at least subconsciously). The girl’s hands run along the bottom horizontal line, and the eyes are accented by being placed along the top horizontal line (the usual location for an eye line). Her body is generally between the two vertical lines, and the bulk of the background takes place in the side, making this young girl the obvious focus of the image.

Let’s look at another image, this time by famous American photographer Ansel Adams. Adams’ image of the Hoover Dam (public domain) is a fine example of the rule at work.

Adams takes the approach of lining up elements along the intersections. The Dam itself is placed along the top-left intersection, and the lower part of the river is in the bottom left. The rock formations are placed on the top-right spot, and the water spillway are on the bottom-right. By placing these major four points in these four intersection, Adams makes them more pronounced to the observer.

These principles aren’t just for still photography though. The Rule of Thirds is just as applicable in cinematography. Granted, you are able to experiment more because of the more dynamic and changing nature of the medium, but the basic principles still apply. Just remember to keep your subjects close to the line, and you will have a solid image. And a solid image means a happy viewer.

Those never hurt, right?