As a discipline to keep this blog-thing interesting (and helpful) to those who may read this blog, I’ve decided to try and post twice a week. We’ve already got a series going on Tuesdays (Tough Stuff), so I thought on Thursday’s I could focus on things that I find helpful (and fun) for my ministry. So here we go.

I don’t know about you, but I am finding youtube clips are becoming more and more useful to use during our programming. The tough nut that I’ve always had to crack was, “How do I get those clips from youtube to my computer?” The answer…google it. Just kidding. Here are two resources that I use frequently to help get clips. By the way, The Youth Cartel has just launched a weekly resource called “Youtube you can use” to give ideas on using clips for your talks. I highly recommend you get on over there and sign-yourself up.

ZamZar.com – I LOVE this site because basically, all you have to do is go to ZamZar, paste the link to the video, input your email address and they will email you a copy of the video to download. Best of all, it is completely FREE and we all know how awesome FREE is to us cheap-o youth pastors. The one downfall is that there is a size limit to the download, so long clips aren’t available for download.

iShowU – is a relatively cheap screen capture software that allows you to capture any video and audio that is playing on your screen. It is used a lot for video tutorials, but I find it works well for snagging clips as well. Sorry windows users, this is a Mac-only application.

Wondershare Free Video Downloader – It’s just that. It’s free (read: limited). This Mac program allows you to download youtube videos simply by pasting the url into the program and organizes them in your movie files. It only allows you to download the clips into .flv files from youtube.com (you’ll have to pay 29.00 to upgrade to all the bells an whistles, which includes more sites), but for what I do this works most of the time.

There you have it, I hope these are as useful for you as they are for me.