Use free tools to create your own area online

Video stars
With camcorders getting cheaper every day and digital cameras that can record video becoming common, there’s a good chance that you might want to share videos as well as photos. Flickr does work with videos but as each is limited to 90 seconds it’s not a terribly good place to store them.

Youtube has become a household name for sharing video online, and contains videos of everything from a dog riding a skateboard to the Queen’s Christmas Message. Sharing a video file on your computer via Youtube is as easy as sharing a photo with Flickr or Picasa.

As with Flickr, you’ll need to create an account, but as Youtube is owned by Google any Google Mail account will do the job. Once logged in (click Sign In in the top right of the screen) uploading a video is simple: you just choose the file you want to share, give it a description and wait.

Youtube handles most of the details of ensuring a video is in the right format for playback, and it can even be used to share high-definition video files. Youtube also gives each user a Channel. Rather like Flickr’s Photostream, this is a page that shows all the files you’ve shared on the site.

Unlike Flickr, though, it’s possible to customise the page layout and appearance. This means you can have a page on Youtube showing all your family or club videos, designed the way you want. You can see one we created at www.youtube.com/user/Computeractive. Friends or family with a Youtube account can subscribe to your channel, so if you add any new videos they’ll be alerted.

Youtube is very popular but it isn’t the only place to share videos online. Vimeo is a popular alternative that offers extremely high-quality video sharing, although you’ll have to pay if you wish to upload more than one high-definition video per week.

Paying for a Vimeo Plus account also removes adverts, gives higher quality video playback and allows you to customise the video player. It costs £36 per year.

Even if you choose a free account, however, Vimeo has advantages. It places a greater restriction on content than Youtube, so adverts and get-rich-quick schemes are prohibited outright, with video game footage and TV shows quickly removed.

This means that there is less nonsense to sift through than on Youtube and has led Vimeo to become preferred as a platform for promoting creative content, such as short films.

Write on
Flickr and Youtube are brilliant for sharing photos and videos, but many people prefer to communicate in a more old-fashioned way: by writing. And for those who want to share words online as well as pictures or videos, the best option is to use one of the many free blogging websites.

Originally designed for online diaries, these are now a convenient way to publish just about anything online. As blogging sites display the latest text at the top of the page, they are ideal for sharing the latest news about a club or society.

Blogs can be used in conjunction with sites like Flickr and Youtube. Both services provide simple ways to ‘embed’ photos or videos into a blog: you simply copy a snippet of HTML code and paste that into the blog where the photo or video should appear.

There are many free blogging services, but Blogger is a good place to start. Like Youtube and Picasa it’s owned by Google, so it’s particularly easy to share videos stored in Picasa into a Blogger blog.

Creating your own blog is easy: simply click the big orange ‘Create a blog’ button on the blogger website. You’ll need a Google account (so one created for Google Mail or Picasa will do), and you will be asked to choose the blog’s address. This will look something like http://yourblogname.blogger.com, and will serve as your place on the web.

Blogger gives you freedom to decide the layout of your page. The easiest way to do this is to choose from the list of ready-made templates, which are found by clicking Choose New Template under the Customise link in the top right.

You can also move some of the page elements around and adjust individual fonts and colours too. Because the design of the page and any entries you’ve written are kept separate there’s no risk to the content when making design changes, so feel free to experiment.

A good alternative to Blogger is Wordpress. This has a wider range of templates to use, as well as a greater range of options when customising your own. Wordpress works in much the same way as Blogger, allowing users to make posts and include images or video in them.