If you don't know about YouTube you must be living a sheltered life... YouTube is a video sharing site that has successfully captured a huge portion of the Internet video market. It has come under some criticism for allowing large quantities of copyright material to be pirated and uploaded onto the site. None the less, YouTube is a powerful tool that can be used by the nonprofit community to raise awareness and market.

What do I need to post and tag on YouTube?

1. An account. Signing up is easy. Go to YouTube.com and click on sign up in the top right corner of the screen. Enter in the required fields and submit. You will get a verification email which with a link that you need to click on to activate your account.
2. Upload a video. This presupposes that you have videos ready to go. YouTube accepts a wide variety of different video formats including: .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG. Uploading a video is simple. First click on upload videos in the top right corner of the site. Second, enter in a name, description, and TAGS. For the Nonprofits in Second Life site, we are asking folks to use NPSL as a tag to identify it as related content. Choose a category and a language. Click "Continue Uploading". Browse for your file on your computer. Just like on Flickr, you can then decide who can see your video--will it be public or private to friends and/or family. Click Upload.
3. This will bring you to a page with a snippet of code you can use to embed your video into your Web site. In my case this looked like this...

<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/04dCZ3Rzsho"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/04dCZ3Rzsho" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>