Online, Video-based Technical Support Networks (on YouTube)
Chris Pirillo has a very interesting experiment going on YouTube.
In a series of videos called Help! (here's the latest), he's recording answers technical / PC troubleshooting on his webcam and then uploading those recordings on to YouTube. In the videos he is recording (no music, nothing fancy at all), he's watching the webcam recordings of those questions uploaded on to YouTube by a community of users he's building, offering his advice in those videos and then uploading those to YouTube.
What's more, the community themselves are now starting to offer their own answers to some of those questions inline, so there's this kind of self-help PC / technical support YouTube video community emerging.
The reach of this experiment is interesting too. One woman all the way from Lancashire (UK) recorded her question regarding a simple way of editing her videos.
Forums and newsgroups have been around for a long time, but what Chris is showing me could be the beginning of an interesting format trend in the area of technical support - online video-based technical support networks . Will be interesting to see where this goes.
