Make It Social!

The Lynda Movie Library has been a very useful service to us over the past couple of years. For $25 a month, you can watch as many movies as you want, most of which are training videos pertaining to the types of media software that designers use.

But it’s not all wine and roses on Lynda. For instance, the video “Building an Online Shopping Cart” just appeared, and since that’s an area of interest to us, Kandace decided to watch it. Unfortunately, an hour or two into the video, you realize that friendly instructor Lawrence Cramer is also CEO & Founder of Cartweaver Lawrence Cramer. And he’s got some software to sell.

Now this all wouldn’t be so bad if we had any indication that this video might not be helpful. Ideally, before vesting several hours of our time into watching it. Sadly, this video is not alone – many of the videos on Lynda turn out to be rather unhelpful, but you don’t realize it until you’ve wasted quite some time with them.

The solution? Let users rate and comment on the videos! Let me share my thoughts, so that others might benefit. It’s not going to make Lynda seem like a waste of time, if there’s some folks saying that this video was somewhat self-serving. Quite the contrary. I’m likely to spend my scarce time on Lynda much more usefully if I can read a couple reviews before diving in.

Raymond Brigleb

Creative Director, dreamer, partner, father, musician, photographer. Has been known to ride the rails. Pulls one heck of a shot.