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We like to share our stories. Remember waiting in line to see those vacation photos, as each dog-eared print passed down a chain of hands?

Then came the slide shows, with late nights in a dark room, trying not to fall asleep to the metronome of the slide click.

The video camera was a revolution that gave us long, shaky footage, with most tapes soon joining slides, photos and dust at the back of a forgotten closet.

As it has done with everything else, the internet has opened up a world of possibilities.

First, by helping us share our travel diaries and photo albums through networking sites such as Flickr, Travelblog, Travelpod and Facebook — and then, through the possibility of sharing travel videos online.

Easy-to-use software

With the help of easy-to-use software, the latest generation of online travel videos are like slide shows on steroids: short, punchy, entertaining and perfect to digest over lunch in office.

Because of their large file sizes and expensive disc space and bandwidth, it took a while for online videos to gain popularity.

But then along came a site called YouTube, with a business model that let someone else pay for the exorbitant costs.

But before you start uploading your adventures, you have to first record the video.

Short and sweet

Most digital cameras (especially on the low-medium end) allow you to take short video clips.

I first used my video function at Bolivia's Lake Titicaca, because just photos couldn't do justice to the stunning scenery.

Throughout my adventures, I took videos, in addition to photos, focusing on short clips of incredible views, activities and people.

With dozens of these clips, it was easy to stitch some together, using a simple video-editing program.

Macs come with iMovie, which simplifies video editing for non-tech buffs such as myself, painlessly adding music, dissolves, cuts and titles.

On the PC, programs such as Adobe Premiere, Roxio's Easy Media Creator and Cyberlink's Power Director are easy to learn and cost under Dh350.

Once you've figured out how to drop clips on a timeline, do keep one thing in mind — keep your video short.

This helps in faster upload and is ideal for our new age of short attention spans (most sites limit video length to ten minutes).

Today's video-editing software allow you to export a video, so that it is optimised for web streaming.

This means resizing the video, limiting the amount of frames per second and compressing the sound to make the file size smaller.

This sounds technical but is vital for making clips web-worthy. Select some buttons from the options given by your software program — and away you go.

Sign up for free

Now you want to upload. YouTube gets over 10,000 clips and streams over 100 million clips every day.

It's free and easy to sign up but there are other options, especially if you want to avoid the heavy traffic.

A site called Travelistic.com focuses on travel content. With a faster upload time, it is building a community of travel directors.

Another site, Motionbox.com, was built to facilitate sharing and searching. It lets you cut frames from your video into pictures.

Travelvoyeur.com and Trip Films also gather the best travel video clips from the web.

This is the strength of all these vide-sharing sites: They're free, they're simple and they allow you to cut and paste a small piece of code so that you can share your video on your own website, blog or social network profile.

But the best thing is that they pay the storage and bandwidth costs for us to share our stories.

Turn of fate

And finally, you never know who may take a look at your movies.

On the strength of my video clips, which I uploaded on YouTube and included in my website, I scored a job as the host of a travel show on Nat Geo Adventure!

With easy software and free video sites, many are realising it's as much fun to create their own travel movie as it is to star in it.

— You can see Robin Esrock's self-filmed and edited “gonzo travel videos'' from around the world on his website www.moderngonzo.com and watch his TV show, Word Travels, on Nat Geo Adventure

Movie mantra