Creatures Caves

(Wow, do the warp week diaries still exist online somewhere? I have completely lost track.)

Video blog is an awesome idea. As for your voice-- you can follow the advice others have given you to improve your speaking, but you can improve the quality of your sound greatly if you record your voice in a separate file from the video, then edit it a sound program (Audacity was mentioned, it's a good free program) to do things like change the volume, edit out white noise, add effects, and so on. Then when you're done editing, sync the audio back up with the video in your preferred video editor.

Experiment with where you hold your microphone as well-- avoid breathing into it, but generally you want it pretty close to you so it picks up more of your voice and less ambient noise.

As for time, it's really as long as people will stay interested. Under five minutes is probably a good rule of thumb but I wouldn't aim for a particular timeframe-- just choose your subject, cover it, and if it ends up being too long, break it into smaller (but logical) parts.

The important thing really is to keep a quick pace with the video-- don't linger too long on one scene, try not to speak too slowly or repeat yourself, just keep things moving. I know when I do videos the original recording is often 2-3 times as long as the final video-- a ton gets cut out along the way, mostly pauses in speaking, dead air, ramblings that I realize later aren't really necessary, and so on.

You'll probably reach a point though, where you have to choose between quality and time investment. While you could spend hours and hours getting your voice and video perfect, you're probably not going to want to take a whole day to make a short video all the time (you might at first, but you'll probably burn out after the first three). So if you and your audience are satisfied with firing up CamStudio (or whatever you use), chattering away for a few minutes, and clicking the upload button, you might not find a need to do anything more. You'll find your balance pretty quickly.

As for ideas-- you could highlight your favorite agents/metarooms and do a sort of video demo/tour of them, or spotlight interesting creatures that are on the TCR. You could even get silly and do something like Creatures Personals ads. Others mentioned some great ideas too.

Feel free PM me if you want more specific help with software, etc.; I'm no sort of professional or anything but I've been working with video for quite a while and I'd be glad to help you get this off the ground

It's so neat to see the CC taking advantage of all the modern stuff computers and the internet are capable of these days and using them to show Creatures to the world!