Photo sharing - Flickr

Sharing videos

Video is a very powerful medium. It is therefore a very popular format for presenting information or instruction of all kinds, whether it be company briefings, demonstrating software (when it is also known as screencasting) or products and processes.

There are many sites where you can host and share videos. Here are a few examples of videos

In this example you can learn how to play the piano. This comes from the video sharing site, 5min.com. Click the Smart Player icon in the bottom right-hand corner for full screen and the complete video experience.

Learning The Piano - Getting Started

This is an example of a demo: the Smartscreen demo from YouTube

YouTube - www.youtube.com - is the most popular video hosting site and one which people are using in all kinds of ways. Although the quality of the video varies, it is still a very compelling site, with millions of people watching YouTube videos. At YouTube:

You can watch videos without an account on the site. Enter yur search terms in the Search box on the front page. A list of videos will be displayed that have been tagged with the keyword(s), and which also show when each video was added to the site, by whom, and how many people have viewed it, together with an average rating. Select a video from the results lists shown and watch the video by using the controls underneath the video.
To link to the video, copy and paste the URL in the URL box on the right-hand side of the page
To embed the video, copy and paste the code in Embed box on the right-hand side of the page
In addition to the many user-generated videos at the site, it provides "channels" for mainstream organisations to share their content, e.g. BBC, Royal Family, politicians like the PM, Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, musicians and music companies like Sony
To upload videos into YouTube you need to have an account. Youwill first need to capture the video. This can be done in a number of ways as explained above you don't need sophisticated equipment, but if you don't have the equipment you could use YouTube's Quick Capture functionality. Note the video needs to be in WMV, .AVI, .MOV, or .MPG format and no longer than 10 minutes and no larger than 1,024 MB in size to host it on YouTube. Once you have the video, you can upload it to YouTube and then share it with others - either everyone or just a defined group.
If you want to create a YouTube channel, take a look at this instruction sheet by Jerry Garner on eHow: How to create a YouTube channel

Top Tools: Top 100 Tools for Learning : YouTube
Further reading: YouTube Reading List
Directory Listing: Video tools, hosting and sharing sites

Sharing presentations

There are a number of sites where you can find and view presentation slidesets created by other users on all kinds of sites. as well as upload and share your own - some even support the creation of presentations online. Presentations can then be viewed at the site or embedded into a webpage. One popular example is Slideshare - www.slideshare.net

Here's an example of a presentation hosted at the presentation-sharing site Slideshare, embedded into this webpage (10 reasons why presentations are going to make it big in 2009)

At Slideshare:

You don't have to have an acoount to search for presentations and view them on the site
You may even be able to download a presentation, if the author has enabled this
Otherwise you can either link to the presentation or use the embed code to embed it in a blog or web page.
You do need an account to upload a presentation yourself.
If you use PowerPoint 2007, you can use the Slideshare ribbon to manage your presentations on Slideshare: SlideShare Ribbon for PowerPoint 2007
You can even embed YouTube videos in a Slideshare presentation. This presentation explains how:

You can create slidecasts (ie narrated presentations) by adding audio to your Slideshare presentation. This presentation explains how to do this:

You can even use a widget to display all your presentations on a web page.

Directory Listing: