This is a fairly recent phenomenon--people can now put their own videos on the web, and share them with others.

This is made possible primarly through Flash-based video services, which compress and squeeze video into a special player (using Macromedia Flash technology) that folks can load and play rapidly. Until now, it took a long time to load a video on the web.

YouTube

The big kid on the block is YouTube. With YouTube, you create a free account, then upload a video file in the same way that you'd upload a photo. The YouTube site then converts it for display on the website, and creates a page for it. Your homepage links to all your videos.

If you have a webcam—or have attached your video camera to your computer—you can also record directly to YouTube. The disadvantage of this is that you can't stop, rewind, or edit your video as you record it; it goes straight onto YouTube.

YouTube was originally created to host personal videos, but has since grown to host all sorts of content. Here are some of the major types of videos:

• Video blogs — Individual users record themselves, talking about their day and/or their opinions on various topics. Basically an online video journal.
• Reviews — A self-styled Roger Ebert will review movies, or books, TV shows, etc.
• TV Shows — Many folks just upload episodes—or parts of them—directly to the site. This is usually illegal, though YouTube has deals with a few TV networks, which do upload clips from their shows.
• Comedy — Some folks record short comedy sketches, or their session at a comedy club, and post them. Think of it as amateur Saturday Night Live.
• Music videos — YouTube is the perfect place to showcase a professional or amateur music video.
• Non-US shows — Fans of anime and Asian dramas will often upload fan-subtitled episodes of their favorite shows. This is also illegal, though it's not as carefully policed as big-budget TV shows are.

Because of all this content, and its popularity, there are a number of similar, competing services, like Veoh, StickAm, and Ustream. Some sites focus entirely on video blogs, for example, ruthlessly eliminating everything else.

Creating Your Own Video

To create a video, well, first you need to record a video.

There are three ways of creating a video: record it on tape, then convert that tape to a digital file, record the video directly to a file, or record directly to YouTube. You can do the latter two if you have a webcam, or if you can connect a video camera directly to your computer.

There are whole books about how to digitize video, so I can't explain it here in simple steps. I can say that, once you've got your video as a video file, simply go to YouTube account, click "Upload", choose your file, and wait for the file to upload. You'll be prompted to enter some information about it—a title, a description, etc.—and then your video will be live on the web.