Ignite Videos on YouTube

All the videos from talks at the 4/29/2009 Ignite Seattle! have made it up to YouTube now. Some links:

• Ignite Seattle! home page
• Their YouTube "channel"
• video of my talk

I actually only heard about the videos arriving from a friend of a friend who saw it go by on some RSS feed. By that time, there were already 47,000 views, so apparently it got posted on one or more popular sites. I tried submitting it as a SlashDot story, but rejected again (0 for 4 over the years, even though SlashDot likes me enough to let me turn off their advertising).

Alas, the domain I slapped up for the video to link to was inaccessible, proving I'm an incompetent sysadmin. Actually, I do sysadmin-ing to learn, not professionally. My ISP's DNS servers are slaved to my "stealth" server, so it looked to me like ronburk.com was up and running, but I forgot that I had never told my ISP to add that to the list of domains they slave to me for, so nobody outside my network could see it. Oh well, I'll get that little one-page wonder up today for sure.

I was surprised by the 47,000 views. I don't know if that implies something about the talk itself, or just luck of the draw having the right random people post links to it on the right forum. In any case, I'll definitely make an effort to present at Ignite Seattle! again when the book is done. They seem a little fuzzy on scheduling (whaddya want for a free event?), but this last Ignite was by all accounts pretty successful, so I'm hopeful it will become a more regular occurrence.

The popularity of this video has made me rethink the format. I had vowed that if I ever did another Ignite, I would not do a memorized speech, as it's too nerve-wracking. But it's really hard to get the maximal value out of 5 minutes if you don't choose your words carefully, and that pushes you towards using a script. Maybe it won't be as nerve-wracking if I have more than a few days to prepare.

Or maybe one gets better at memorizing with practice. Few of us can recite something the length of the Iliad from memory, but there used to be rather more people on the planet who could do that sort of thing before cheap paper and pens greatly decreased the value of memorization as a skill.