September has been a long month for me. The new site launch at work had me working a lot of overtime. I think I’m overdue for a haircut. Despite my exhaustion, I can say I’m excited about potential opportunities that come with working exclusively online.

During the summer, I moved from the Radio department into a newly formed Web department at work. At prior multimedia jobs, I’ve worked with a lot of recent graduates who tend to be young, early-adopter, video gaming males. However, in this new department, I’m the only male out of eight full-time employees. Three of my colleagues have babies less than a year old. The only thing strange about all of this is the occasionally awkward water cooler conversation about “pumping.” They’ve already joked about me being the minority, and my skin may not be as thick as I thought. When laughter lasts just a second longer than necessary, it seems to slide down a few notches from hilarious toward humiliating.

In the world of bees, the queen bee and all the worker bees are female. Male bees, called drones, live to mate and die shortly thereafter:

Should a drone succeed in mating it will soon die because the reproductive organ and associated abdominal tissues are ripped from the drone’s body as copulation occurs.

In the world of bees, females rule. And if I had to choose a role in a society of bees, I might just decide to be a worker bee. After all, it sure beats the having the lifelong goal of getting your genitals torn off.

I’ve been doing some digital housecleaning and I dug up a video from 2004 of me narrating my MFA thesis exhibition. It was online in the first iteration of nathangibbs.com but managed to get swept under the rug when rolling out Wordpress last year. Bringing the video out of the closet got me thinking about how much online video has changed even in the last year and how poorly I’m taking advantage it.

So, I went ahead and uploaded everything to YouTube, Google Video, and added self-hosted Flash versions here on the site. I added copy/paste embed code to give bloggers as many options as I possibly can to make it portable (a huge improvement over the quad-option WindowsMedia / Quicktime / Hi / Low choices that launch a popup window). I also adjusted the wording on the links in the header, re-ordered the sidebar, and added Related Posts to the bottom of each blog entry.

While the updates aren’t revolutionary, it does feel like a milestone. The videos are out there, really out there, with searchable transcripts on Google and everything. I was always hesitant about giving the videos away to places like YouTube, but in the end, the value of visibility is worth more than the $0 status quo while it sits on the shelf. And if the videos start going nuts on YouTube and Google, both have there’s always the option to charge if that made sense further down the line.

Check out Color Studies for a version of me two years ago talking about my work.