Tag Archives: youtube

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I was vlogging before you were born

I dug into an old backup drive at the weekend and found this. I’ve been looking for it for ages.

It’s the very first piece of video that I made and shared via the internet. This was August 2005, 8 months after I’d started podcasting in a similarly impulsive, unplanned and amateurish way (three adjectives that have defined my career ever since!)

We’d heard of YouTube by this time, but I don’t think it was available in the UK so this was originally at libsyn.com where I was hosting my podcasts (audio blogs) – I can see I used a thumbnail of me gurning in the original blog post that linked to it.

Within a couple of months I had my first (unpaid) promotional vlog series for a line of men’s grooming products. So yes, I happily describe myself as an (if not ‘the’!) OG beauty vlogger.

I finally joined YouTube in March 2006, by which time I was regularly collaborating with Debbie Davies on our (too) short-lived series “All This And Brains Too” so my first video on YT was “Desperately Seeking Harvey”.

I’ve made a playlist of all the vlogging and vlog-like content I’ve got. I find it annoying that I can’t seem to edit the metadata so that things will show up in the order they were created rather than when they were uploaded. But that might just be me being old.

If you’re silly enough to try bingeing that vlog playlist, do let me know how far you got before your brain melted.

What I've Been Doing, words

Ten years of online video

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Last night, someone commented on an old video of mine on YouTube. It was from some work I did in 2006 making content for a site supporting a consultation around education for the creative industries. That’s as much as I remember really. Mostly it was talking to “grown-ups” about what “skills are needed by industry” but I also got to go down to Peckham and interview a bunch of young people about their experience of Theatre Peckham (then known as New Peckham Varieties).

The commenter had said “Omg is that John boyega 😭 so happy for him” And so I had a look and yes, about one minute in, there’s a fourteen-year-old future Finn looking surprised to hear that not only had Sir Ian McKellen worked in the West End, but also that he was in the (then) new X-Men movie.

Go on, watch the whole thing. He pops up later too. If you spent any time around theatre when you were young, you’ll recognise yourself and your peers in there somewhere.

It made me realise that I’ve been on YouTube for nearly ten years. 2006 was the year it all got going. At the start of the year it was some experiment that guys at PayPal were doing, I joined in the March (but didn’t fully commit to only posting video there till much later – hence the broken video links in some of my posts!) and by the end of the year it had been bought by Google. And still people were saying video on the web was just a fad 🙂

It might be time for a retrospective!