Category Archives: 090302 – Auto-Loading Sounds: A Public Service Announcement

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One Year On: A Report

When The Media Show had been in production for about a year, AfterEd TV’s managers asked me to write up a summary of the past year. This was what I wrote, covering production, publicity, and distribution. Note that our take on YouTube and deviantArt has changed in the year since.

Look at the episodes before and after this document. Did we manage to make the appropriate changes? Which parts of this assessment were correct, and which do you think were off-base?

Production

Weekly production may be overrated.

By now, we have a good, if small, core of subscribers on YouTube and followers on Facebook. A large number of our YouTube views come from the subscriber pages. This probably means people are finding us automatically, without being reminded a new episode is up because of what day it is.
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Lesson Resources – Auto-Loading Sounds

It’s true: guidelines for good web design suggest that it’s not good to have a sound automatically load along with the rest of your website. It’s the reason we’ve turned off YouTube’s “auto-load featured video” option on our YouTube site, and recommend that other users do it as well. Having rich content load automatically when a user lands on a website also hurts users in areas with low bandwidth. Here are some tips on how to support those with low bandwidth.

For more tips on good web design, we recommend the websites of industry favorites Jakob Nielsen and Jeffrey Zeldman.

Viral video: Things you could send Aunt Mabel

Some Media Show episodes, like the Online Predators, Jingles All The Way, and Secondary Sexual Characteristics episodes, are pretty edgy. Edgy videos might get sent around among people who like that kind of thing, but the really successful viral videos are the ones which can be accepted by a general audience — the ones you would send to your Aunt Mabel as well as to the friend you were partying with last night.

In the second season of The Media Show, we planned a series of super-short, funny videos which we hoped people would pass around. We chose Internet topics which we thought people could relate to and maybe hadn’t seen any other videos about. This resulted in the Passive Aggressive Smileys, Auto-Loading Sounds, Netiquette, Warcraft E-Card, and (revised) Snopes Before You Send videos.

Compare the view counts for these short “public service announcement” videos with the view counts for other videos. Do you think they were more successful than the others in “going viral”? What aspects of each video do you think contributed to or detracted from viewers’ willingness to send them along?