This year I have signed up to attend the Youtube Academy Bootcamp. It's managed by various "Creators", and that brings me to the first bit of terminology you will hit when you become a youtube publisher. Creators are the people who create content, (not copy it, not curate it, but create it) and the academy can take you through all the basics. Sound, film, lighting, production tips, publishing tips, layout, energizing, and delivery style. But most helpful are the pointers and the help you can get in the community. My favorite thing there is the 10 fundamentals and the dozens of tutorials, which you can work though in any order.
(image copyright Creator Academy YT)
The 10 fundamentals are discrete aspects and are quite easy to generally pick up in any production work types or content categories.
Shareability
Conversation
Interactivity
Consistency
Targeting
Sustainability
Discoverability
Accesibility
Collaboration
Inspiration
A few of these might sound like a tall order for one person, but I'm coming from an angle where I want to have fun, learn stuff and not at all try and race for subscribers (I have about 20) or grow my channel by stats alone. Oh, one thing you will realize, making your channel unique and your own is one good thing, but ignoring these fundamentals will make your life a pain even if you only have a niche audience in mind. To join up follow the (Google email /G+ login required) link.
Teetotal, Super Cat lover, quad-copter, Fruitcake
Perhaps you want to have a channel limited to vegetarians who own more than 1 cat, have at least 1 quad-copter, eat fruitcake, and never drink any alcohol. You get my drift, niche is good, but so is Sustainability, ignore viewer stats at your peril, it will drain you if you don't.
Feedback
I kinda hope I'll be taking these on board one at a time and using them to make my channel more fun, relevant and sustainable. If I'm doing the #fail please please please do let me know.
Sometimes I go for walks in the rain, you would think that frogs would love that kind of weather... Was standing in a bus shelter to get out of the rain. Just trying to keep my
sojourner badge after screwing it up a few months ago; when the rain stopped for a sec. It looked like the shapers
were sending me what looked like 3 co-ordinates over the bus stop timetable
sign that I was sheltering under. It was a sign from the other side!
So I got inspired, ran home and planned a field because one of the co-ordinates was just 100 yards away and I already had 5 keys for it. So I went out and made a 3-layer over my neighborly Smurf's village of Landbeach. At least I got a retaliation for my efforts! Basically it works like this, I smash the nearby village and @elfazi rebuilds it and gets all the AP for himself and then anchors a few small fields off of my village. Rinse and repeat every few weeks.
The shapers made me do it
I always walk away with less AP in the balance with the retaliations. So this time I was going to triple-layer the whole thing. Only because the shapers made me do it.
The mission started at about 7pm, dinner is always a priority. I was not the only agent out and about, missed one of the Dave's and @sundaydancer by about an hour in Histon nearby it seems. That was the scene for the outer layer of the field, so some company was always welcome so long as they did not block me. I had 6 keys for the single anchor, but the rest was an onion, that started to take shape slowly in my minds' eye and with a bit of pre-planning in iitc. But first I had to destroy @elfazi's little village to not only give him less free kit, but also to deny him the L6, L7 portals. I burned out most of the portals walking around it 3 times over. It seems he has @polymophix and @balzoid come visit the village, and I get almost no regular help at all. Clearly I need to be buying more beers it seems.
The whole route was about 8 miles of driving and 2 miles of walking. I actually noticed some blue activity near one of the anchors while putting it up. So I had to do some pre-emptive smashing work to slow any would be interruptions down. That slowed me down a little, but not enough it seems
Almost complete.
3 Layers - it lost the outer layer an hour latter due to a level 6 over eager Smurf who likes going for walks at 10pm - typical.
By the following morning teatime @elfazi came over to smash the anchors on my end too. Mission accomplished. Even if it was only 2K MU. A decent AP boost and that leaves me still about 4 million short of level 15.
All the cool kids
Yay, I'm still cool and only #68 on the scoreboard for the day.
Here's a little clip from the 1st time I did a local mini mission and had a little battle.
I'm the kind of agent who does not pay too much attention to backstory (admittedly you are not really hardcore if you don't know at least the back-story basics.) Or memes. But I am obsessed with the game. As I've hinted I was addicted to Minecraft in the past, where my ign is zaphodikus obviously, but I've not logged in again since I picked up agent level 2. Curious to know what your obsession with ingress is - my main obsession is the video making, then the walking, and lastly the pub visits.
#1 The video making obsession comes from the huge number of screen recordings I made in Minecraft. Minecraft is really great for telling stories. Here is an example of a Star Trek Minecraft battle enactment. Kringeworthy, because my Star Trek knowledge is really pretty pants. So please do rip me off.
#2 The walking. Yes my average is around 20 kms a week. I have reached 40 kms in a week, but I generally aim to reach 30 as often as possible. This blog is thus a key part of my Ingress walking journey. Why, well around the time I got hooked on Minecraft I had a knee cartilage tear, this kind hurt like hell just to climb stairs - and every house in the UK has stairs. Probably because nobody in the UK knows how to design houses properly, but that's another matter altogether and has been a failure for so long that Brits just get on with it now. I had some knee surgery, which helped a little, but had become couch-bound in the meantime. This led to cabin fever and grumpiness; until I discovered ingress. The beauty of ingressing is that it takes your mind off the pain in your knees long enough for you to start getting fit. Getting fit improves your mood, and pretty soon the inflamation in the cartiliage is treatable with a bit of anti-inflamatory and glucosamine tabs, which builds cartialige, but you have to take a lot of it. Hence some people get a bit miffed with me walking fast when I go smashing or 8-rolling, I don't pause to glyph too often - but that's once again another thing to talk about later. But no I do not walk that much, I'm still trying to get the onyx trekker. I think you need to walk about 40kms a week to get that badge, and often I just have to give my knees a break and I fade out for a week to recover.
#3 Pubs. We don't have nearly as many pubs back in South Africa; well not ones you can walk into and then walk out of alive or not in scarred in some way scarred or other. I am not a drinker by any measure, and have a terrible constitution saving roll. But I do know how to cheat the dehydration effects. Drink a lot of water at high speed when you slip off to the loo. The pubs in Britain are a brilliant installation and should be saved at all costs! That and the curries. Without pubs Britain would be a shambles, I'm sure of it - the walls have ears.
To be able to start at the beginning, there must be a now to come back to. Lately I have been ignoring cheats in the game. Ingress will always have all kinds of cheats, there are many ways to gain unfair advantage, some are plain dishonest, and some are just exploits. I'd obviously like to think that ENL don't cheat ,but we clearly do. If we did not, then the effect of XM on humans would have to be as the Resistance put it mind controlling. But it is just a game, and if it were not that would be enough proof anyway. So we have a ENL player with a number of L8 accounts who lives in the City (Cambridge - yes the real #ing Cambridge.) He uses the accounts to create P7 portals often and then couch hack for kit. As a result we have opted to not build portals near his couch - anything we capture there gets pineapled or just built out to level 4, local Smurfs know it too and regularly smash the lot. We call our cheater and his multi's the "8 team". We also never talk or invite them to anything we do, its the price cheaters pay on both sides.
Anyway, that's where it begins. ENL do cheat - where it is now is a Smurf. I'll not go into the smurf who got grounded by his wife who thought he was cheating on her - the drinking and staying out late gets lots of us in trouble. Although that is unfortunate, it's good to know that RES and ENL have pretty much the same problem here. We all firmly believe the opposite team do not have real lives and that they have scanners hard wired to their wrists . LOLz No I'm on the hunt for a certain Blue team player who has 2 accounts and operates out of Saffron Walden. We see anyone carrying two scanners as a cheater, and with quite a bit of circ. evidence I'm going to try and catch them red handed, perhaps only a lighter shade of embarrasing orange-handed. It's not my aim ever to ban cheaters, thats another matter. No blood on the floors please, I believe people can change.
But suffice, if you are that agent, I'm onto you, and if you see a dude with an Indiana Jones hat and a scanner glowing green, you are going to be on youtube!
We raided Bishops Stortford rather than play vs the cheats in Saffron Walden.
But your time will come. That Saffron village will be Lime!
