Interesting Science Video Sites

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As you look around the internet at the ever increasing video sharing sites it is amazing how interesting some of them really are. I recently visited SciVee which is funded by The National Science Foundation, encourages scholars with a paper hot off the press to make a short video highlighting the key points. It also accepts unsolicited submissions that have no connection to any published work.

The site was launched this summer by Phil Bourne, a pharmacologist at UC San Diego, after seeing his students hooked on YouTube. Bourne wanted a reputable virtual place where researchers could trade techniques without the potpourri of topics found on general video sharing sites.

Further browsing has revealed several similar sites such as LabAction, Jove and DnaTube that offer the ability to upload serious scientific videos for scientists to promote their studies, lectures and seminars. Some experts say the biggest advantage to science videos is making research more accessible to nonscientists. There’s no guarantee that video can’t be manipulated, but the medium also may force scientists to think twice before committing fraud.

Translating the experiments to video isn’t be without challenges. Chief among them is attracting enough Web traffic to make the sites profitable. Even combined, the science video sites attract an extremely small group compared with the hoards who flock to YouTube, which drew 48.5 million unique U.S. visitors in October, according to comScore Inc.

This is just another example of how online video is becoming important to our daily internet lives and how important it is to display videos on your site. Take a look at this video from SciVee which is well produced and interesting.

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