YouTube in a lab notebook

One of the undergrads working in my lab (James) has been recording short video segments to document his experiments on the synthesis of anti-malarial compounds. It turns out that video is an extremely effective way to communicate the details of a scientific experiment. On several occasions I was able to understand what actually happened and spot problems in ways that words just can't capture.

What has made this even better is that we are now posting these videos to YouTube and tagging them with "usefulchem" for easy retrieval. In addition to being a great way to share videos, YouTube nicely compresses, hosts and streams them (so we don't have to). It is reportedly easier to use than Google Video. One limitation is that videos are limited to 10 minutes, which is why I have not yet uploaded my lecture recordings. At some point I'll have these modularized and uploaded there.