Monday, January 2, 2012

The problem with YouTube

I've been posting a lot of YouTube videos here, but I'm discovering one big problem with that. They tend to disappear.

Just the other day, I had a video and all links in a post go bad, because that YouTube user had closed his account. Well, I was able to fix that one by finding duplicate videos elsewhere.

But now I've discovered that almost all of the videos in my Hitchslap posts are also gone, for the same reason. YouTube users come and go. Sometimes they remove a particular video clip. Sometimes they just disappear completely.

I used to have that problem with images, too, when I was new to blogging. But I can save them and upload them to Blogger myself (with all appropriate credits, of course), so it doesn't matter if the original image disappears.

But I'm not sure what to do about this problem. Sure, it's unlikely that many people go back to my previous posts, I suppose. Not all that many even read the current ones. But it's still disappointing. I spend enough time on this blog that I want to do the best I can.

Well, I don't know. I might be able to find replacements for those Hitchslap videos, though I don't know if that's the best use of my time. Frankly, it doesn't sound like much fun. But the bigger problem is that this will undoubtedly continue to happen.

I really don't know what to do.

2 comments:

Chimeradave said...

I say give enough background in your posts so that if one version of the video disappears anyone that looks at your posts can try and search for another posted version of it on youtube or google video search.

Bill Garthright said...

I don't know, John. Maybe I can do a better job of picking video clips that are likely to stick around for awhile.