The last few weeks I have been working on and have now completed fionajones.org – a new website for my mother’s fledgeling private therapy work. Powered by WordPress and based upon a theme by NattyWP.

She’s a Family & Systemic Psychotherapist and has 15 years experience in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, providing individual therapy and family therapy for people encountering a wide range of problems. Part of the work was a marketing strategy and designing the brand (associated print media is to follow).

However video is different, you have the king YouTube which is by far the biggest site, but you also have other sites, lets see if I can list some off the top of my head: Vimeo, Viddler, MySpace, Dailymotion, Veoh, Blip.tv, Stage6, IFilm, Metacafe. They all have much smaller audiences – some stand out from the crowd, Viddler does comments inside the video as Leo Laporte currently loves, Vimeo does HD, but most are pretty much the same.

I’ve posted YouTube videos here, but they aren’t my work. For my videos I want the big audience but I hate YouTube, video quality is shit, video player and site are ugly and the users are most often idiots. So if I’m not going with the biggest audience then it doesn’t matter which other site I pick? I just choose which has the features I like the most.

Currently Vimeo is my favourite the site looks great the player looks great the video looks great, its got HD for “when” I get an HD camera and the site is full of people who like good video. They remind me of flickr and they even let you import flickr photos. However one thing hold me back – their TOS. They don’t let us keep full copyright on stuff uploaded! I just wish they had a nice Creative Commons system like flickr.

Currently I have hosted my video directly on my site – which is great in many ways. I know they won’t go away, I can choose a custom poster image, really simple custom player and high quality video. However other people can’t embed the videos and my video aren’t part of a community which sucks.

So in conclusion I’ll stick with self hosted until Vimeo gets its act together.

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