You probably have already noticed that nowadays it’s becoming fashionable online to share technical material via videos (eg YouTube.)
I somehow can understand the appeal of creating videos for sharing thoughts/news, esp b/c it takes way less time and focus compared to writing things (just hit the record button and go.)
But videos are
👎 not index-able (at least locally)
👎 not searchable
👎 not copy-paste friendly if at all
👎 impossible to skim through
👎 a major distraction from the train of thoughts
IMO, in most cases, the more effective and impactful medium of technical comms is the written form: a Mastodon toot, a blog post, a gist, a Pastebin entry or even a Facebook post!
What are your thoughts?
It sounds like adding subtitles (or at least a transcript underneath) to your videos would solve a few of your problems.
I’m not sure what you would be planning on hosting your videos on but at my work we use Microsoft Stream to host recordings (cost reasons) and it let’s you search through the subtitles of videos as well as set chapter markers too, both of which I believe are also supported by public facing sites like YouTube too.
Of course, “why write a transcript when you could just write a document,” and, fair. But if you’ve got a script for your video might as well make it into subtitles right? And besides some people, including myself, appreciate a video over written documentation so I can see the thought processes behind things rather than having to abstract it from screenshot or descriptions. I don’t mind written documentation but when presented with the choice I’ll go for the video