Greeting’s InetEntrepreneurs. How is everyone doing out there today? We have been busy as usual doing what we do. In the last communiqué with you we added additional time slots for more articles. It’s been a week since we made this change and it has gone over pretty well so far. However, it may have gone over too well. It may have to change again. The articles in the queue have gone up over 500! Wow. We are trying to come up with a solution that is scalable and works for everyone. Besides, we do not want to have to work around the clock. We do have lives. We guess as they say, it’s one of those good problems to have. We will figure it out. Thanks again for your support.

Anyway, let’s get to the reason for this communication to you today. This article is to officially Beta release a new feature upgrade to the blog. We are so excited about this. We can hardly get this out without stumbling over our words. This is Beta for right now because there are a number of things that are unknown. So we figure instead of trying to guess, let’s make it work and put it out and see. Once you find out, we believe you will be just as excited as us and it will go over very, very well.

Without further a due. Drum roll please…..Up until now this was only available to us the admin writers of InetEntrpreneurs.com. Now InetEntrpreneurs.com has expanded it’s systems to include you! InetEntpreneurs.com is proud to present the capability to embed your own videos within your articles from YouTube and other video sites. This is HUGE! This transforms InetEntrepreneurs from just a readers blog to a video blog. We realize that some people are visual in how they learn, so this will assist.

Now we have to stress some ground rules here. This does not mean it is open season. All videos will have to be approved along with the article before it is released publicly. If your video is not approved, the article can still be approved. You do not have to submit an article with a video. You can still continue to submit articles as you have been. The video feature is only an option to you if you want to utilize it. Likewise, if you do not have anything to say within the article and only have a video, you may do so. We are allowing just video post as well. However keep in mind that we are not hosting your videos on our servers. You will need an account with YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Below is a list of supported sites we can embed in your articles.

It is very simple to submit your videos in the articles. All you have to do is go to the “Post Video Options” widget which is located beneath the article text editor (where you type in your article) and insert the URL to the video (ex. www.youtu.be/kithe11934dc). You do not need to set the width and height attributes. This is already preset system wide in the back in. Then click update post. When the page refreshes, you will see a preview in that same section with your video. You can play it right there to make sure it works. That is how you will know that it worked. Then submit the article as you normally would. And your done! Leah has done an outstanding job putting together a quick YouTube video showing exactly how to do this. Watch it if you need help.

Since this is a community blog about learning, the videos you insert with your articles MUST be related to what the article is about. We are putting together a rules and regulations guide for the articles and the videos. Some of you may not be aware but it’s a good time to mention it right now. All articles must be at least 400 words or more to be considered for approval. This is only for regular articles with or without a video. There are some articles in the queue now that are less than the minimum. If you are reading this and one of those authors, please go back into your back office and update your article to this threshold or it will be marked for deletion.

If you are not writing any material, and just submitting a video post, it does not have to meet the 400 word requirement. However, make sure the Title is descriptive enough to tell what the video is about. You should write a short description -150-200 words in the article body describing the video.

Right now we are only supporting certain video sites. We will add more as time moves on. As we stated this is a Beta test to see how well this will be received by the community. Here is a list of supported sites you can embed your videos from.

YouTube (only public videos – “unlisted” and “private” videos will not embed)
Vimeo
DailyMotion
blip.tv
Flickr (both videos and images)
Viddler
Hulu
Qik
Revision3
Scribd
Photobucket
PollDaddy
WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)
SmugMug
FunnyOrDie.com

We are truly excited about this new feature on InetEntrepreneurs.com. This new feature will change the course of this blog. Have fun with it and our hope is that you will find it useful. We cannot wait to see your videos!

Best of success to you all.

John and Leah