House keeping the mike downes Google and YouTube Channels

All of us have been online for years now -- and in that time we collect links and vanity URLs. Some we use every single day and some we let fade like the horizon in a rear view mirror. I've a set of three that double to six (or treble to nine).

They are:

google.com/+mikedownes .. youtube.com/mikedownes .. gaming.youtube.com/mikedownes
google.com/+mikedownes2 .. youtube.com/mikedownes2 .. gaming.youtube.com/mikedownes2
google.com/+mikedownes3 .. youtube.com/mikedownes3 .. gaming.youtube.com/mikedownes3

In  the last five years, we've seen lots of sites and services appear, claim to be wonderful and essential to us - and then shrink off and disappear in the very next breath.

I default to how people find stuff, and that's over 90% worldwide using Google. Of course, many people will spend all day debating that 90%.. for that reason, I've embedded a chart below, or you can go google it - maybe ending up at statista.com 89% netmarketshare.com (Google 83%).

Either way, have some fun with gs.statcounter.com as you can gleans loads of useful info about: Desktop, Mobile, Tablet and Console. And then drill down to Browser, Screens, Operating Systems, Search Engines, Social Media and Platforms.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share

Google offers us a tons of services (as Google, and many more outliers as abc.xyz). From the support.google.com, we have the expect ed dozen lead icons, then 58 Consumer, 45 Business and 7 developer.

From one simple google login, you get access to all these -- most for free. Which ones do you use? My Google Dashboard report tells me 37, but I think I use far more, if not double that (Google Takeout offers me 28 product data sets to download).

And that's with all the Product and Help Forums, where there are 41 (again, though many more than that). There are also 621 listed official blogs, youtube channels, twitter, and facebook accounts.

I mention all this as I've made a housekeeping claim at the start of this post. A way, if you will, how I've decided to back a few horses like google.com/+mikedownes and youtube.com/mikedownes.

In other words to spend a lot of my time creating stuff like videos (and text/photo posts) to be watched, read and shared by people. I call it a real world classroom.

I guess it's either in your nature to be curious or it isn't - for me, it certainly is. For example, I joined the Google Local Guides community program when it started. I've achieved Level 5 and just past 12 million views for my photos - anyone can contribute to Google Maps and it's quite good fun to see a photo you took amass 100s of 1,000s of views.

To conclude, my mind is very much open on this topic. One fascinating area for those who do wish to make more of Google/YouTube is how much help is being given for free.

For example the YouTube Creator Academy Lessons and Courses. And in case you missed it, the quote from TuTiTuTV from the top of this page, here it is again.

For me it means, for free, you can make use of the Google mass of servers and the internet's worldwide system of cables to produce a message (like a video) and get it seen in realtime all over the planet -- and not only that, earn revenue from it. That's quite incredible when you think about it.

I have a little collection called, Mike's journey through the YouTube Creator Academy.. And will be making videos in more detail, including The Rough Guide to being a YouTube Creator ..

As I say in this post, youtube are very good at writing a Smooth Guide by leaving out the names of hardware and software. One example is the thumbnail lesson where there's no mention of software - not even google's like Drawing.

More soon on how I intent to use mikedownes, mikedownes2 and mikedownes3 ..