Usdin.net!

I like YouTube. Really, I do. I like the ability to share video on the web. The amount of stuff up there is just massive, and a lot of it is rare stuff you can’t find anywhere else.

But - and you knew that was coming - I’m really, really getting tired of embedded video everywhere I go.

There are two reasons I’m really bothered by YouTube embedded video. The first is that it’s not aesthetically pleasing. It always has a blurry screen capture from a frame of the actual video. It’s big, and ugly, and it just plain looks bad.

The second though, is a little more substantive. See, it used to be when you had a blog - you actually wrote stuff. If you had a video you wanted to share - you probably wrote something about the video - maybe you even took a quote out of it to use in your post, and then you wrote your reaction to it. You had a link to the video, should someone want to actually watch it. Now - with YouTube it’s making bloggers lazy. Why write a post about a video when you can just put it right there on your blog?

It’s not everyone, and it’s not all the time. But it is happening a lot. I’m tired of it. I put out a call to bloggers - do not use YouTube embedded video. Make a link instead.

–*Rob

PS - Yes, I know I have used YouTube Video - I think it was only once. I’m not gonna do it again.