Thank you for your interest in Thailand Video Blogs. This website is brought to you by the award-winning Paknam Web Network. We are proud that this is the first video blog inside of Thailand. In fact, if you google the phrase "thai video blogs" you will see that the first two sites listed are part of our network (thaistudents.com and thai-blogs.com). We have been recording video clips for several years and some of these have been posted on our websites. However, we have always been frustrated by the slow speed of the Internet and so never really developed a video website. Now, things are starting to change worldwide. Even in Thailand many people are starting to subscribe to broadband Internet. This now means it has become feasible for many people to watch streaming video on the Internet. So, in April 2006, Thailand Video Blogs was officially born.

How do you shoot the videos?

At present, we are using a Sanyo Xacti C1 digital camera. This was probably the first digital camera that allowed you to zoom while shooting video. You can take digital pictures with this camera but we usually only use it to shoot videos. But, it can also take good pictures. You can see some of our food photos taken with this camera on enjoythaifood.com. The memory card is 1 GB which is just enough for 30 minutes of DVD quality video. We only have the one card, but when we are on location, we can download onto our portable harddisk/card reader. This is 80 GB which means we can shoot a lot of video when we go out. The new version of this camera has just come out and it is called HD 1. It is high definition. We are very tempted to buy this but the cost is quite high. What we really want to do is to be able to use two video cameras at one time so that we can cut between the two. You may have seen our popular Thai Food Videos which would look better if there were two cameras.

How do you put the videos onto the Internet?

There are a number of different ways of getting your videos onto blogs. We use use a program called Swish Video 2 which painlessly imports our video into a Flash player. The program has about half a dozen different skins you can use for the player. Once this is done it is ready to post to the blog. We are using Joomla! for the first time which is turning out to be an excellent Content Management System. We will write more about this later.

Is it expensive to run this website?

We don't have so many videos online at the moment, but as this number grows, together with the number of visitors, we expect our running costs to increase greatly. At the moment, this website is on our main dedicated server. Once the bandwidth starts to increase we will have to move it to its own server. Other costs involve the video equipment and related hardware. Thailand Video Blogs will always be free and we won't be restricting any content. If you wish to make a donation to help the running of this site then please visit the Million Baht Project. We reckon that is how much we need to keep the network running over a three year period.