How-Tutorials at Your Fingertips – For Wired Do-It-Yourselfers, Videocasts Offer an Easy Assist

If you’re interested in a do-it-yourself project and want to get to the nuts and bolts with a minimum of chatter, turn off your TV and turn on your computer.

A growing number of how-to shows and magazines are presenting tightly edited video clips of highly focused projects on their Web sites, on demand, and in your own good time.

(Videocasts, like their podcast counterparts, are fairly easy and inexpensive to produce. You can do them with a laptop, a digital tape recorder and a digital video camera.)

The clips are compact — no more than five or six minutes long — because they eat up a lot of space on a Web site. But if you’re a hands-on person rather than someone who watches to kill a Saturday afternoon, you know all too well that many shows contain more talk than actual news you can use around the house.

By Alan J. Heavens
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Full Story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/21/AR2006092102135.html