Discovering YouTube as a publisher.

YouTube has always been a bit of a scary monster to me.  The idea of putting up a video for everyone to view, on a medium where everyone might just look is pretty scary.  It's akin to being 12 at the school dance standing with all the other boys at one side of the hall and just petrified of being shown up in public. 

Odd really I'm perfectly happy to use Facebook with an occasional public post, google plus, linked in, and github.  But video just seems too revealing somehow.

Why did I pop my YouTube cherry?  

I was attending a performance by a couple of my students at the local eisteddfod, and wanted them to view their performance.  I had a fairly decent video, the sound was good at any rate.  Due to the limitations of the iPhone on the 3G network the video was too long for email, too long and would degrade too much to send by message.  On my iPhone was a third option, standing there politely like a gorrilla in the dark with a whopping great club - YouTube.  

I really didn't want my video to go public.  Which is what I thought would happen, but when I experimentally pressed the button to see if it would allow the video through.  The third option presented was to make the video private. I thusly felt a whoop of tempered elation. If I'd known that I could control who viewed my videos I would have experimented with this so much sooner.