Let me say – waking up to discover that our screencast for newly-relaunched US ecommerce site Ztail is featured in their TechCrunch coverage is really rather cool.

We deliberately added the screencast into YouTube for them so it could be easily added to blogs and news-outlets for increased coverage.  Initially they used Vimeo (but strictly-speaking that’s against Vimeo’s T&Cs) and then switched to YouTube so the peak viewership was recorded at Vimeo (but that’s now deleted).

Ztail host their own copy on their home-page.

Ellen worked with us to re-write the script using AIDA and other techniques to pique the viewer’s interest and keep those that could benefit from Ztail’s service watching through-out.

We’re rather chuffed to say that our screencast that explains the open-source Adblock Plus plug-in (Washington Post) is the 15th most popular video in YouTube’s Sci/Tech category this month.  We created this screencast with Wladimir (Adblock’s author) to explain how the plug-in works, how to get it and how to get support.

This screencast is second only to a screencast by Google on Privacy which puts us in with rather forward-thinking company.

With 600 views a day (we’re guessing 16,000 views for this month) and 36 feedbacks of 5/5 this screencast is a great way for us to give back to the open-source community and to help explain this very useful plug-in to potential new users.  It also reduces Wladimir’s support burden as more users know what to expect when they install it and how to get help in the forum if they have questions.

We’re also honoured in two other categories, in total:

• #15 – Most Viewed (This Month) – Science & Technology
• #64 – Top Rated (This Month) – Science & Technology
• #57 – Top Favourited (This Month) – Science & Technology

Over Christmas I’d spoken to Wladimir Palant of the Adblock Plus project, Adblock (you guessed it…) strips ads from within Firefox.   Some of his users had trouble understanding how the plug-in worked and how to get it installed.  We offered to do some open-source advocacy where we’d explain how to get started and find help for Adblock Plus in just over a minute.

Richard and I put time into developing a brief, scripting, storyboarding, animating and screencasting this short tutorial and we’re really rather happy with the result.  A higher quality version is listed on our usual Examples page, we decided to go with YouTube since it makes it easy for a viewer to embed it in their blog for advocacy.

Wladimir has a nice entry about our work, I’ve also covered it as has Richard.  This screencast is our 3rd for open-source advocacy after Django in Under a Minute and IE8 vs Firefox 3.  The open-source advocacy effort builds upon the fact that I’m a co-founder of ShowMeDo and have created over 130 tutorial screencasts about open-source.