A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to see talks by Dr. Tom Crawford of the YouTube channel TomRocksMaths and also Dr. Derek Muller of the YouTube channel Veritasium. These were being given as part of a science communication all day workshop, which I heard was very good. And because Veritasium were filming some videos here.
TomRocksMaths
Tom came across as a really nice person, just enthusiastic and passionate. His talk was about how he's made making his youtube videos part of his career. Effectively he works as a teaching fellow at some cambridge college, and they also employ him as an outreach fellow, and that includes the youtube. Nifty!
- pHd in applied maths/oceanography answering the question "where does river water goes when it enters the river" by building a model. The answer is that it does a circulation at the mouth and forms a boundary layer along the coastline caused by the coriolis force.
- After that he had various part-time positions and a bit of a "portfolio career" (he didn't use that term -- but that's what it was). I should make sure this website is a useful portfolio of everything I do that I want people to know about!
- Uni admin/admissions love knowing the number of prospective students you've reached. that's their favourite number, cos they know how much it costs them to reach that many!!
- Reading comments is actually really useful, and issuing corrections and having a personality is helpful for building a positive relationship with your audience. (mags: also take notes from atomic shrimp)
It was a very good, fun, well-presented presentation. And he took a big selfie with us all afterwards as a momento!
Veritasium
Hmm... well, I don't have much nice to say about him personally based on how he comported himself, so I'm just gonna stick with the useful/interesting things he said:
- Viral is the intersection between relavent and relatable and never seen before. I guess this is something to think about if I'm invited to give that MRI talk.
- He also reccomended having a safety net/part time position if you're trying to do a creative/precacious career like content creation
- The useful bit is the thinking you cause to happen. How do you guide people to have thoughts (c/o that guy and the thinking method)
- Wow he cares so much about thumbnails and titles -- because that's how he makes his money and pays his employees' salaries. By the way, Veritasium has external investors. I didn't know that! That explains why the videos changed so much a couple of years ago.
- Their Amelia Earhart video is about radar... I should watch that, I love radar!
- Structure: story and reflection. The experiment is the story and the reflection is the analysis and explanation... why is my php syntax hightlighting reflection? ah well, it's a cool enough word.
Kinda interesting that neither are full-time youtubers. Tom is a lecturer/outreach fellow + youtuber and Derek is actually the manager of a medium-sized production company...
Both Tom and Derek stayed around for like 90 minutes after their talks taking photos and autographic calculators, which was really kind of them. I've never been around that kind of celebrity before and it was really interesting seeing people queue up just to speak to them! It reminded me of the crowds when the 2012 olympic torch/queen went through my parent's town. I'm trying to think what the biggest celebrity I've met is and uh, no idea!
It was also nice seeing one of these things doing so well, I know the lecturers who organised it and they work really really hard, so that was cool! Good for them!
I definitely do not want to make youtube videos -- it's so much work! Even though videos is where everybody goes first, I don't want to thankyouverymuch. I guess I'll stick with crappy blog posts and trying to get people to read them...