And now, ...the video

First, I want to thank everyone who responded to my prior blog post and its accompanying survey, where I asked when video is better than a paper. As I mentioned already in the comment section for that blog post, the results were loud and clear: 53.9% of respondents indicated that they’d prefer reading a paper, and 46.1% indicated that they’d prefer watching a video. Basically a clean 50/50 split.

The comments suggested that people have a lower threshold for “polish” with a video than with a paper, so one of the ideas to which I’ve needed to modify my thinking is to just create decent videos and publish them without expending a lot of effort in editing.

But how?

Well, the idea came to me in the process of agreeing to perform a 1-hour session for my good friends and customers at The Pythian Group. Their education department asked me if I’d mind if they recorded my session, and I told them I would love if they would. They encouraged me to open it up the the public, which of course I thought (cue light bulb over head) was the best idea ever. So, really, it’s not a video as much as it’s a recorded performance.

I haven’t edited the session at all, so it’ll have rough spots and goofs and imperfect audio... But I’ve been eager ever since the day of the event (2013-02-15) to post it for you.

So here you go. For the “other 50%” who prefer watching a video, I present to you: “The Method R Profiling Ecosystem.” If you would like to follow along in the accompanying paper, you can get it here: “A First Look at Using Method R Workbench Software.”