[Editor's Note: Michael Dean and Alan Lastufka wrote this article for their upcoming O'Reilly book YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts. During the final edit, it had to be cut for space reasons, but we thought it was too interesting and valuable not to share. —David Battino]

One of the great things about YouTube is that it allows anyone to share video with anyone else in the world, immediately. One of the not-so-great things about YouTube is that same immediacy. Videos on YouTube do not have a lot of longevity. A two-week-old video on YouTube is very old news. Yesterday's papers. Last week's fish. That's fine if all your videos are about very topical subjects, like world headlines, fast-changing technologies, or which supermodel is having which Hollywood celebrity's baby.

But if you make videos that have more permanence, you may want them to have more staying power than chalk on the sidewalk waiting for the first rain. That's especially true if you make videos that don't just reach the world, but could actually change the world.

Shoot for the Pod

With tens of millions of video iPods out there (and the number growing daily), you might want to aim for that viewership. You can use the power of blogging software and an RSS feed to make your videos downloadable, savable, and playable on an iPod (or on any computer with iTunes installed, which, these days, is many of them). And people will have your videos to view at their leisure, so they'll save them longer.

If viewers like your videos a lot, they may even back them up on their hard drive or a disc to enjoy again or share with others. People won't need to be sitting in front of a computer to enjoy your work. They can watch while waiting for a bus, while sitting in the doctor's office, or even after World War III, when YouTube is a distant memory and we few lucky survivors are sitting in caves watching videos on solar-powered iPods. He who dies with his art on the most hard drives, wins.

Setting up a blog site and including RSS-syndicated video is not as easy as simply having a YouTube page, but it's worth it if you want your videos to live on for the ages (or at least last longer than the milk currently in your fridge). Explaining all the ins and outs of configuring blogging software and using RSS feeds for distributing media could fill a book, but I'll point you in the right directions to get started.

RSS Me, Baby

"RSS" stands for (depending on who you're talking to, and which version you're using) Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary. What's important, though, is what it does. An RSS feed is a tiny text file (in a format called XML) that points to other media. RSS enables people to subscribe to a site and automatically download new audio, video, or text posts when they become available. That way, if there's a video director (or blogger) you like, you can automatically get updates without having to keep going back to their page every day. Once you're subscribed, new posts or videos are automatically downloaded by your RSS reader (aka "podcatcher" or "aggregator") each time something new goes up.

RSS is the basic principle driving podcasting. Wikipedia has a good definition:

A podcast is a series of digital-media files, which are distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and computers. The term podcast, like broadcast, can refer either to the series of content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also called podcasting.

Fig. 1: The standard RSS chicklet tells you an RSS feed is available.

The "pod" in "podcasting" derives from "iPod," but nowadays many devices and programs support media-rich RSS feeds. You've probably seen the RSS chicklet on various websites. (See Figure 1.) A chicklet is a small icon next to a blog post or online article that shows that the site has an RSS feed or other external service available by clicking. O'Reilly has dozens of RSS feeds.

Most browsers now include RSS support for text posts, and iTunes includes support for subscribing to audio or video podcasts via RSS. I have an RSS feed on my audio podcast Radio Free Nestlandia: The Voice of a Two-Person Nation in Suburbia.

On my friend Shawn Thorpe's YouTube pages, in the "More Info" part of each video page, he has a line that says, "Video also available for download from my website: www.shawnogram.com." (See Figure 2.)

Fig. 2: Shawn's Thorpe's blog site offers numerous feeds. (Click to enlarge.)

Notice the "Subscribe / Contact" section at the bottom right of Figure 2. There are several chicklets — one each for subscribing to his audio-only podcast, his video-only podcast, and an iTunes feed that contains both the audio and the video feed. If you click on the iTunes icon, and you have iTunes installed, iTunes will automatically subscribe you to his feed, and will download new media as it becomes available. (People can also subscribe manually to the audio-only or video-only feed by copying the link and pasting it into iTunes via iTunes' Advanced menu. Other quick subscription options include Bloglines, Google Reader, the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox, and the "Subscribe to This Feed" feature of Internet Explorer.)

If the subscriber has an iPod, iTunes will automatically transfer the new audio podcasts and/or videos onto her iPod each time she connects her iPod to her computer.

Shawn's "Subscribe/Contact" section also contains chicklets that link to Shawn's pages on various social networking sites, YouTube as well as MySpace, Flickr, and the social bookmarking site Delicious. There's also a clearly labeled email contact link. Shawn's site also has an easy-to-navigate header bar at the top right with links to the various pages on the site.

This website is an excellent example of an elegantly simple interface — everything the viewer needs to find is clearly labeled, with absolutely no flashy crap to distract. I really wish more of the Internet were laid out like this. Too many sites stress flashy design over usability, which is the opposite of the way you should do it if you really want to stand out and reach the world.