Just check back over your recent browsing for a minute. How many of the sites you enjoyed contained nothing but text, and the odd photgraph? How many of them had links to videos, or had videos embedded in them? How many had links to podcasts, or embedded audio? How much of your time do you spend browsing sites that exist just to distribute video (YouTube, Vimeo... there are lots more out there)?

Provided you have a reasonable broadband link, I'm willing to bet that you don't just stick to reading text and looking at photos.

So, if you want lots of people to visit your own websites (particularly blogs), you're missing out if you don't include the odd video and audio clip.

Judge for yourself. I sat down, unprepared, with no script, and did the one below off the top of my head, in the middle of creating this hub.

Still very basic. I did the bare minimum of editing - clipped off the beginning and end, and made a messy job of the transition between two takes. The reason for the two takes was that I went wrong in the middle, and had to re-take from that point.

I've still got the problem of the computer screen reflecting on my glasses, because that's where my storyboard is. This video was too long for me to memorise without a few notes.

There's one other problem: most webcams and camcorders provide output in uncompressed format - the little webcam clip was over 100 Megabytes initially.

Before you upload the file to YouTube, Google, or whatever you choose, you should at least pass it through an editor (Windows Movie maker will do) and save it in a format suitable for the web. Sites like YouTube will stil reprocess it and create a Flash file, but many won't let you upload very large files.

I made the video above to promote the online ocean racing game at sailonline.org. I uploaded it to YouTube and then embedded it in my blog NewFreebooters. Later, I also uploaded it to a few other video distributors to get it more exposure.

Embedding other people's videos in your blog posts is a good way to make them more exciting, but why not go a bit further and embed some you made yourself? The first ones will probably make you cringe (even professional performers often hate looking at themselves on video), but each one you make will be easier and better than the one before. Go on. Give it a try.