I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this sooner. You’ve seen me complain about having to answer the same questions over and over again in YouTube videos, and it didn’t occur to me until recently that a partial solution to my problem was right in front of me all along: the ability to annotate my videos! YouTube introduced this feature a while back, and it allows the owner of a video to create text overlay comments in the video – essentially adding information to the video after the video has been shot. I think I can cut down on 80% of the repetitive questions I get if I add annotations to my videos explaining that, no, that netbook doesn’t come with an optical drive.

I heard this saying once: “There’s no such thing as a stupid question, just inquisitive idiots.” Keep that in mind as you read this. Since I started doing videos on YouTube for my business Web sites two years ago, I’ve made a real effort to respond to every question I can. If someone asks a question, no matter how basic, I’d answer it. Some days I’ve spent a solid 60 minutes answering questions, typically on a Monday after a weekend of posted questions. As my videos have gotten more views (I’m up to over 1.45 million total views, 97% of those on YouTube) the rate of questions have increased. It’s not uncommon for me to answer 30 a day when I put up a new video, and people seem to really appreciate it – I’ve had many people tell me they’re amazed that I answer questions, since many people who create videos won’t do that.

There’s something I’ve noticed however: YouTube is full of “inquisitive idiots”; people who ask questions without spending even one second trying to find the answer for themselves. For every one question I get from someone who has a legitimate question that requires an answer, which I’m happy to answer, I get 30 from the inquisitive idiots – people who ask questions I’ve already answered in the video. Check out the question below that was posted earlier this week:

When I read that message in my Inbox, I swear I felt about a million neurons groan and die inside my brain. The combination of txtspk, poor grammar, and the string of questions, several of which are answered in the video, made me want to do anything BUT answer this comment. To this person’s credit, it looks like they actually went to the HP Web site and did some research – most people opt to ask me questions that they can find the answer to themselves: size, weight, price, specifications, etc. I often have all that information in the sidebar of the video, but most people don’t look at that. (more…)

Last month when we were in Canmore, we researched a few places that we wanted to go eat at. One of the places we looked up online, but didn’t end up going to, was called The Wood. The above screen shot was taken from their site. Notice anything? Unless The Wood is catering to the uber-elite Latin-reading crowd, what they did was launch their Web site without replacing the Latin placeholder text with real text. Putting in Latin text is an old page layout trick, but you’re never supposed to go to “print” on the Web with it. Talk about not having an eye for detail…

If you happen to be a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed I haven’t been updating it as much lately. Part of the reason is that I’ve jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and am doing the 140-character micro-blogging thing. If you look to the right of this message you’ll see a Twitter box that has all of my recent tweets. If you want to know what’s up with me, you can check out what’s inside that box. Or if you’re a Twitter user, feel free to follow me. I follow a small number of people and read everything they post, so I’m a bit different than the average Twitter user – that means I might not follow you back. It’s nothing personal. There are some Twitter to WordPress plug-ins, but I’m not sure if I want to “spam” my Web site with digests of my tweets, so for now, they’ll remain collected in the side-bar widget.

With shipping charges like that, it’s no wonder people are losing interest in using eBay. I find myself using Kijiji more lately to sell things, and I’ve bought less and less from eBay – largely because of sellers who gouge people with insane shipping charges.

What’s that above? A screen shot of three of the comments I posted on one of my YouTube videos this afternoon. I was responding to the comments and questions that other people have left, and I spent about 60 minutes today posting replies…only to have a tiny fraction of them actually make it live. YouTube happily lets me click the POST COMMENT button, but it never posted most of my comments. There’s nothing worse than spending time doing something, only to have all your work vanish. YouTube’s commenting system has been buggy for years, and they never seem to fix the problems with it. Worse yet, even as a YouTube partner, I can’t even talk to anyone about this issue – their partner email address now goes into a non-monitored email account with an auto-responder telling me to use a contact form that doesn’t seem to exist. Everything that Google buys turns to crap from a customer service perspective, YouTube included.

“Amid fears that Canada’s culture is being drowned in a sea of online video from around the world, federal regulators are looking at setting up a $100-million fund to support homegrown programming on the Internet. The controversial proposal, which is aimed at staking out a more distinct national identity online, has pitted the television production community against Canada’s Internet service providers, who may ultimately have to foot the bill, or pass those costs onto customers.”

I can hardly believe what I read in this article. For the non-Canadians out there, the CRTC is the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. They’re the regulatory body that’s made some very unpopular and rather questionable decisions over the past few decades. Canadian radio stations, for instance, have to play a certain percentage of Canadian content – which means we tend to hear a lot of the same songs over and over. There’s a lot of good Canadian music out there today, but forcing it to be heard is ridiculous in my opinion. Though I understand the concept of having the Canadian voice be heard, I believe that good music floats to the top of the refuse regardless of where it’s from – and that it’s not the job of government or my tax dollars to enforce that. It’s no different for Internet video – I’m a Canadian who makes videos and posts them online, but I don’t need or want my government to somehow “encourage” my fellow Canadians to watch my content. My tax dollars should be going toward health care, defense of this nation, and other government-run areas. Keep your hands off the Internet CRTC – this is one Canadian who doesn’t want your help!

I’ve been using Twitter pretty heavily for the past few weeks, and I’m definitely grasping why some people really like it – but I also see some of the typical social networking abuses I see elsewhere. Take RSS feeds for instance: I un-friended some people on Facebook when they started pulling in their gadget blog feeds. If I’m interested in being Facebook friends with someone, I’m interested in them as a person – not necessarily in their gadget blog. I can read their gadget blog via my RSS reader – cluttering up a Facebook feed, which is supposed to be about people, with technology news is counter-productive, at least from my point of view. The exception to this is if they’re importing the RSS feed from their personal blog – again, since I’m interested in them as people, seeing what they’re writing on their personal blog is an extension of that.

I’m seeing the same thing happening on Twitter – people I’m following are importing their tech blogs so I get alerted whenever they post a news item to their blog. I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but if I’m following you on Twitter, it’s probably because I’m interested in what you, the person, are thinking/doing. Getting a steady stream of RSS updates just adds noise into the equation. Odds are good I’m already following your tech site via RSS, so getting alerted twice whenever you publish something is a waste of my time and attention.

I think the solution as far as Twitter goes it to have a Twitter feed for your technology site(s), and one for yourself. That way people who want to get Twits when you post a new story to your site can get that, and people who want to connect with you as a person can follow your personal Twitter feed…until they stop following you because you’re Twitting every 5 seconds about really inane things. But hey, no system is perfect.

Yesterday morning I put up a few items of IKEA furniture on Kijiji. I’m always amazed at how quickly I receive responses for the things I list – I’m either selling things too cheaply or have a super-compelling pitch style. I received a message from someone yesterday – they were the second person to express an interest in the item, so I wrote them back saying that I’d keep them informed if the first person bailed on the purchase. This was the response waiting for me this morning:

“i will like to purchase the item out rightly,I am willing to offer you $1400 for it and i will be paying you with my credit card via my PayPal account,I will also like you to send me your paypal details(PayPal e-mail address) including your phone # so i can effect payment to you right away and make sure you get back to me so that i can arrange for pick up as i will like the item to be picked,so no shipping included.i will appreciate if you can get a PayPal Bank account to make things more easier for both of us. NB:Honestly, I do not know the actual worth of this item because I’m always busy sailing. If my offer is not ok, Let me know so i can shoot up abit or bring it down as the case maybe. Thank you for your understanding, while i await your urgent response.”

So they want to pay $1400 for items that I listed for $250? And all because they’re too busy sailing in the land-locked provice of Alberta? Gosh, what a deal for me! I’d better hand over my PayPal email address and my phone number on record so I can get all that extra money! Sheesh. I’m not sure what sort of scam they’re trying to pull with my PayPal email address and phone number – I suspect some sort of identity/account theft, though if PayPal’s security is that lax, that concerns me a bit. Regardless, it’s good to remember that if something seems to good to be true, it is.

“Keeping up with Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook is bad enough, but I now sense that really ugly things are happening to those platforms making them less and less useful to me. It’s the rise of the social networking application. You know what I am talking about, those applications that are built by third-party developers to take advantage of the social network ecosystem the companies are so proud to create but we all come to hate over time. My friend Ira is a Facebook whore. He signs-up for every cause, group, or application sent to him by, well, anybody. Then what’s even worse is he expects me to sign-up too so he can send me whatever crap is the specialty of that subgroup. I love you, Ira, but I just can’t do as you ask.”

I really couldn’t have said it better myself – check out Robert Cringely’s full article. What’s going on now with social networking sites/applications is similar to what happened with email. The signal to noise ratio is rapidly becoming more noise than signal, and it’s frustrating to watch happen. Let’s take Twitter for example: like any form of communication, it has it’s uses for some people, but like most new forms of communication, it gets abused at first – kind of like when your mom first gets email and she spends the first year forwarding you jokes and urban legends. I think we’re at the high-water mark of Twitter abuse and maybe 2009 is the year when people stop twitting everything they do/see. Or maybe Twitter will just die – they have no business model after all – and this will all be moot.

Back to Facebook: I went through my “friends” list and removed about two dozen people. I thought I could be all clever and create a list and move some of my business contacts into it, but it seems with lists you don’t get much control over what they see…so it seems that putting people into the limited category is still the only option if you want to have your real friends see what’s going on in your life, and your business acquaintances see a simpler, more sanitized version. I can’t be the only one that wants to share more of my life with my friends than with people I know in a professional capacity, but Facebook sure doesn’t seem to understand that.