Playlists

Playlists are similar to your favorites, because they are an additional resource for saving and accessing particular videos. Playlists can even help you organize your favorites. Playlists are usually created around certain themes or genres within the videos. Perhaps you want to create a playlist for all the original music videos you find on YouTube. And say you create another for all the collaboration videos you appear in on other people's channels. These are great uses for YouTube's playlist feature.

To create a playlist, click the Account link found at the top of every YouTube page, and then click the Playlists link. To the right of the screen is a New button. Click it to create a new playlist. You'll be asked to name your new playlist. Choose a title that's short and clear so you'll remember which videos are in that playlist (Figure 5-7).

Figure 5-7. Click New to create a new playlist.

You will then be taken to a page that will allow you to edit your playlist information (Figure 5-8). Most options are self-explanatory. You'll need to briefly describe your playlist for others who stumble upon it, and YouTube will provide you with the link to your playlist so you can share it with others. You'll also need to assign your playlist a few tags, which I described earlier in the "Uploading Your Video Treasures" section.

When you're finished with all these settings, click Save Changes at the bottom of the page, and then you're ready to start adding videos to your playlist.

To add a video to any of your playlists, you will need to visit that video's watch page. Simply navigate your mouse pointer to under the playing video, and click Playlists. You will be given a drop-down menu filled with your playlist titles; select the playlist you want to save the video to, and then click OK (Figure 5-9).

Figure 5-8. Add a little information about your new playlist.

Figure 5-9. Adding videos to your new playlist is very simple.

If you have a project that is more than one video (either because the video is longer than the 10-minute limit, because you had to break it into sections, or because it's an ongoing series along a related theme), you can just send people the URL of the playlist, rather than sending them a list of many links.

I made a playlist for Michael Dean's film D.I.Y or DIE: How to Survive as an Independent Artist, because the video is in eight sections, which correspond to the eight chapters of the DVD. The playlist is here:

www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=66D2811AF0B5755F (URL 5.1)

I also made a playlist of a series of comedy videos I did called YouTube University: