48 MacDirectory
BOOK REVIEWS
and eating habits can help or hurt your
brain and how easily our perception of
reality can be deceived.
His discussion of memory is particularly
interesting and incredibly useful, offering
some explanations of the paradox of why
there are so many things that we have
trouble remembering (like where we left
our car keys) but are sometimes haunted
my memories that would much rather
forget. Memory, it turns out, is not the
most intuitive feature of our brain, but
MacDonald offers a number of ingenious
techniques, ancient and new, that will
make the most of our available RAM for
our short-term needs and improve our
learning skills
Chapters on logic, emotion, happiness and
love provide a wonderful blend of science
and philosophy and help to explain some
of the most puzzling, pleasurable and
outright annoying aspects of our interior
lives. The author even includes some
simple tests that help define your
personality and interests.
The subject this edition of the Missing
Manual series has the challenge of taking
on a subject that can (and sometimes
does) fill an entire library. What is
particularly remarkable is MacDonald's skill
in picking out the most useful topics and
his consistent wit and dry humor that
make the book incredibly fun to read.
Even though there's obviously fewer
screen shots than most of the books in
the series, it is generously illustrated and
nicely designed and organized.
Your Brain
– The Missing Manual
is unquestionably
one of the most eclectic books in this
Pogue Press series and it's unquestionably
one of the most fun and universally useful.
Now if we can just remember where we
left our copy…
Your Brain: The Missing Manual
by Matthew MacDonald
Pogue Press/O'Reilly
261 pages; $24.99
ISBN 978-0-596-51778-6
YouTube: An Insider's
Guide to Climbing
the Charts
How do you make it big on YouTube?
Well, if you have a lottery winner's level of
luck, you could post something cute,
imaginative, outrageous, (or some
combination thereof) and have it go viral
for several minutes, hours or days. Or you
can do it the hard way, by learning about
the medium, understanding the market
and creating a story that will keep viewers
coming back.
A new book by YouTube celeb Alan
"fallofautumndistro" Lastufka and writer
Michael W. "Kittyfeet69" Dean offers a
wealth of advice and expertise for the
latter. YouTube: An Insider's Guide pulls
together a remarkably wide gamut of
tools and techniques from a variety of
disciplines to help your work become a hit
(or at least get some notice) in the world's
most crowded media marketplace.
The authors start out by cramming several
semesters worth of filmmaking basics into
a short but fairly intense chapter on
storytelling and directing, including how
to shoehorn the requisite Hollywood
formulas into your five minute YouTube
masterpiece. (Discovering how well a wide
range of Hollywood films fit into this
simplified framework is enough to make
this chapter worth reading.)
Given that YouTube videos can be
produced on devices ranging from a cell
phone to an HD Digital Betacam, it's
understandable that the production
related chapters are rather limited in
scope, however they do go into a fairly
detailed tutorial of Sony's Vegas editing
software for the PC and offer little or no
advice about Mac hardware or software.
Another obvious omission is information
on how to best encode video for YouTube.
What you feed into YouTube's great
compression machine can have a huge
impact on what you get out.
Even if your work is artistically and
technically brilliant, there's one thing that
holds true for both Hollywood and
YouTube: You gotta know how to play the
game. This is where the
Insider's Guide
excels. When you manage to produce a
video that attracts a wider audience than
your brother in law and a couple of
coworkers, it runs the risk of coming
under the scrutiny of copyright holders or
people who are all too happy to claim
your hard work as their own. Here, the
authors offer some great tips and a
number of resources that will help you
stay safe and keep legal.
As Alan Lastufka discovered, it's possible
to actually make money on YouTube, but
it's not a "get-rich-quick" or particularly
easy venture. Like almost everything else,
it takes a lot of marketing expertise to
build up your audience and get the
attention of those who can translate your
popularity into profitability. It's not easy,
but it's not impossible.
Given the book's limitations, it is still one
of the most complete and incisive guides
to YouTube success on the market. And,
to paraphrase the old adage,
lonlygirl15s
are made and not born.
YouTube: An Insider's Guide to
Climbing the Charts
by Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean
O'Reilly
281 pages; $29.99
ISBN 978-0-596-52114-1
