• YouTube is a fascinating way of not doing any work, especially if you are promoting videos rather than watching them. I find I’m getting a little obsessed with my statistics on ShooRaynerDrawing, where I give drawing lessons.

    It’s happened in the past with other sites. Back in the late nineties, when MP3 was just getting going and the ipod hadn’t been dreamed of, I started putting audio, music and stories, onto the much missed MP3.com. It was actually possible to make money from uploads in those days! I think I made about $40 – which I immediately spent back on the site in promotion. It might have been a bit of a scam but it was fun – quite like a sim city kind of game really, building your little empire on the net.

    Since then, XML and tagging have come into being and the choice of tags is quite important if you want people to find you in all the noise. So I’ve been fine tuning my tags and watching to see if they have any effect, and they do. Getting your tags right does bring in more hits. These are not people randomly finding you, but you making sure that your video gets put in front of people who might be looking for it.

    HOWEVER! This morning, while tweaking one set of tags, I noticed three tags that I would never have written myself – Visual Art Media – That’s just not in my vocabulary. It sounds American or academic. Or it sounds like the terms a professional tagger would use while summing up a site – standard tags.

    SOMEONE has been adding tags to my videos on YouTube! It wasn’t me and I don’t have anyone working on the channel with me. I can’t imagine a hacker being so helpful, therefore it must have been someone at YouTube dropping in a few tags of their own to “help” me along!

    Hmmm! Not sure how I feel about that.

  • I’ve spent the afternoon setting my mum up with her first laptop. She’s going to be Eighty Four tomorrow – a real silver surfer!

    She’s got a Facebook account, knows how to get to times online and has just about got the hang of point and click. I guess there’ll be a lot of handholding for a while. Already she’s being bombarded with Facebook emails as my niece tags her in photos. Slowly, slowly does it – but all power to her for having the guts to embrace the internet at all.

    Wait till I get her videoconferencing with her relations in Norway – There’ll be no stopping her.

  • HYPERBOLE

    Pronounced High-per-boh-lee for some reason. Hyperbole is guff – stuff that advertising agents and politicians produce to dazzle us and make us think something is what it isn’t. The more current word, Hype, is a shortening of the word.

    A load of exaggeration that is not really meant to be taken literally, but often is. Basically it is the art of selling.

    Learn a new word every day.
    Repeat it and remind yourself what it means at least three times in a day.
    Try to use the word in conversation or writing today.
    Get a dictionary and look words up.