My wife had taken some short video clips of a dancing event that she attended and asked if I could get it up on the web so that other members of the group could see what had been going on. I've never uploaded to YouTube in my life, although had been an consumer of some of the millions of videos posted there. Getting it into a format suitable for YouTube was a different story. My original files (4 different clips) ranged from 120 to nearly 900 Mb and my assumption was that they were just going to take forever to load and that no one would ever have the time to see them on anything other than a hyperfast optical broadband connection (eg 20 Mb per sec or more). I rummaged through some old Windows XP magazines (I have in my filing cabinet of useful computer geek stuff) and came across Windows Movie Maker. Wow I had so forgotten about that package. After a quick couple of very small trials and figuring out optimum delivery sizes for the web I knocked up a quick set of the 4 clips and posted them on my YouYube account. An e-mail came back within a couple of hours from one of the organisers thanking us for our marketing efforts!

  

I took the option to customize the video player for my own blog colours - hence the purple borders - take down the video size to 50% of the original and drop it into my blog space using the embed video feature. So easy - I can see more opportunities comming up already...

 

So here goes - "Scottish Country Dancing"  (in England)  - Viewers looking at this blog in OLSB ( may not see the video ) need to click this link click here

 

       

 

 Reading St. Andrew's Scottish Dancing Society

 

 

 

 

 

I installed a "guestbook" specifically written for Office Live Small Business from the guys at Solutions for Office Live (http://solutionsforofficelive.com). Great little app with flexibility to be able to approve each guestbook entry before it ends up on your OLSB site. There were a couple of entries from other OLSB users quite quickly so I thought it would be a valuable tool to see what people think and gain some contacts that I wouldn't have otherwise picked up. It worked for a while.

 

Within about a week the spammers caught hold of the url for the guestbook and instead of checking out any new contacts and comments most of my time was spent deleting rubbish guestbook entries. Fifty entries a day became tedious - although thanks to the way the app was designed - a facility to "bulk edit" entries in a spreadsheet style made the process quicker. So for those of you who wondered where the page went... :-)