HowStuffWorks is a website that was founded by Marshall Brain and is dedicated to explaining the way many things work. The site uses photos, diagrams, video and animation to explain complex terminology and mechanisms in easy-to-understand language.
YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google.
eHow is an online knowledge resource with more than 337,000 articles and videos offering step-by-step instructions on “how to do just about everything”. eHow content is created by both professional experts and amateur members and covers a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories.
wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. With your contributions, we can create a free resource that helps millions of people by offering solutions to the problems of everyday life.
Instructables is a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others. The seeds of Instructables germinated at the MIT Media Lab as the future founders of Squid Labs built places to share their projects and help others.
The video content on the site takes a variety of formats that include informative “How To” and “Ask The Expert” films that guide you, step-by-step, through everything and anything in life. The “How To” format delivers easy-to-follow, bite-size tutorials on a wide range of topics from cleaning tips and sport, to relationship advice and recipes.
Nettuts+ is a site aimed at web developers and designers offering tutorials and articles on technologies, skills and techniques to improve how you design and build websites. [They] cover HTML, CSS, Javascript, CMS’s, PHP and Ruby on Rails.
We’ve been in the Tutorial business for quite some time now. Many authors here have been teaching online since 2004, while others have taught in classroom environments and seminars. [Their] goal at Tutorial9 is to offer the most blissful learning experience possible – at no cost whatsoever.
5min is the leading syndication platform for broadband instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos. [Their] library includes tens of thousands of videos across 20 categories and 140 subcategories, which are professionally produced and brand-safe.
W3Schools is a web developer’s
portal, with tutorials and references relating to web development subjects,
including HTML, XML, CSS, and JavaScript. W3Schools is free of charge, and is
funded through text and display advertising. The tutorials and references on
the website and the related code are proprietary.
Howcast just might be the future of
online how-tos. The site has plenty of community DIY videos, but the impressive
pieces are those produced by Howcast Studios and Emerging Filmmaker, of which
there is a surprising plenitude. These videos feature labeled jump dots on the
duration bar so you can skip right to "Step 3" if you feel like it.
There are warning, fact, and tip dots as well. You can also print off an
accompanying "Easy Steps" page with condensed instructions and
thumbnails.
WonderHowTo
Culling from over 1,700 Web sites, WonderHowTo has gathered a whopping 225,000 videos so far through human- and auto-selection. On the one hand, you've got a mammoth collection to peruse, but on the other, there are a few duds floating around. In any event, the site is neat and tidy, so the occasional overabundance of videos and their differing media players should not be an obstacle in your pursuit of mastering any given subject.
Culling from over 1,700 Web sites, WonderHowTo has gathered a whopping 225,000 videos so far through human- and auto-selection. On the one hand, you've got a mammoth collection to peruse, but on the other, there are a few duds floating around. In any event, the site is neat and tidy, so the occasional overabundance of videos and their differing media players should not be an obstacle in your pursuit of mastering any given subject.
DoItYourself.com
The days of hopelessly wandering the Home Depot aisles without a clue are over. DoItYourself.com is an invaluable resource for home improvement and repair, with thousands of DIY articles with comprehensive steps, schematics, and some videos. You can also chat with savvy homeowners on the forum, shop for materials (the site provides dealer locations), and get free contractor estimates for your more unwieldy projects.
The days of hopelessly wandering the Home Depot aisles without a clue are over. DoItYourself.com is an invaluable resource for home improvement and repair, with thousands of DIY articles with comprehensive steps, schematics, and some videos. You can also chat with savvy homeowners on the forum, shop for materials (the site provides dealer locations), and get free contractor estimates for your more unwieldy projects.
The recently redesigned SuTree
aggregates video tutorials from over 250 sources. Their library includes over
11,000 videos covering just about every topic you can imagine. They republish
videos from a bunch of other sites on this list.
A user generated video tutorial site
covering a large number of topics. Their "Computing" section is one
of the most active and features a number of great tutorials about how to use
various computer programs.
Expert Village calls itself the
world's largest video tutorial site, and with nearly 49,000 videos, they might
be right. Expert Village produces videos using a network of "experts"
in various fields. Anyone can sign up to be an expert and the site contacts
those it feels would do well hosting a video tutorial series.
A really cool video tutorial blog
that instructs on how to achieve a number of "hacks" using common household
items (usually these have to do with technology). As an example, the video
embedded below demonstrates how to charge and iPod using an onion and some
Gatorade (not sure why you'd ever want to do that, but, still pretty neat):
Make Magazine is, in general, one of
the coolest DIY magazines out there, instructing each month on a variety of
awesome projects. Their online video podcast is a great collection of tutorials
on how to do cool things like make a potato cannon or screen print your own
t-shirt.
Another video tutorial site that relies on user
contributions, ViewDo also mixes in some tutorials created in house. ViewDo covers
a ton of topic areas, and one of the nice things about the site is that videos
can be downloaded to a portable media player (like an iPod or PSP) and watched
on the go.
Sclipo not only encourages people to share their
knowledge, but also provides a utility for them to do so via webcam. As on most
video sharing sites, users can rate and comment on clips.
This is a rather strange site that mixes up video
tutorials with video classified ads. I'm not really sure where the crossover
is, but if you're looking to buy a used car then learn how to change its oil
filter, then perhaps this site is for you.
TeacherTube is a straight up YouTube clone aimed at
providing an outlet for educational videos that I gather can be used by
teachers in class. Some of the videos were pretty good, but the site seems
really unfocused compared to the rest in this round-up.
Offering people-powered guides, you can read a review of
Koonji compared the site to Instructables and Squidoo .
Speaking of Squidoo, while not totally focused on
tutorials, Squidoo's lenses are a font of information about all sorts of stuff
and often include how-to guides (or links to them!).
Who could forget About.com? Not us! Buried in the
editorial of About.com are hundreds of tutorials, including a growing amount of
video content -- you just have to dig for it sometimes.
Comments
Post a Comment