Earlier this week, in the teeth of a wicked storm, I trekked to a stu­dio loft in San Fran­cisco for the first tap­ing of 5 Across, a new video pro­gram under­taken by Mark Glaser of PBS’s Medi­aShift blog.

The gath­er­ing was inter­est­ing on sev­eral lev­els. First, because it was instruc­tive to see how Mark would struc­ture a new Inter­net video “show.” (It turned out, with a pro­fes­sional cam­era and sound crew, Low­ell Rifa ex light to illu­mi­nate the sub­jects, qual­ity edit­ing and host­ing on blip.tv.) Sec­ond, because the dis­cus­sion did raise some points of dis­agree­ment. The five guests were myself, Veron­ica Bel­mont of Revision3, YouTube com­edy con­tent man­ager Mark Day, Eric Elia of Bright­cove and Irina Slut­sky of Geek Enter­tain­ment TV.

Some of the themes I returned to were:

• Be authen­tic. Let peo­ple hear, see and sam­ple the gen­uine sto­ries you want to tell. Draw from your own life and your community.

• Just do it. If you’re think­ing of div­ing into online video, just do it and don’t get hung up on the tech­nol­ogy. Too many peo­ple are par­a­lyzed by worry about how their pro­duc­tion will look instead of focus­ing on just telling a story.

• For­get shows. Don’t get hung up on pro­duc­ing a “show” with “episodes.” Start out by post­ing a few video snip­pets you like. If you can edit them in iMovie and add titles, all the bet­ter. And if it even­tu­ally devel­ops into a show, that’s great.

• For­get viral. Don’t get hung up on dis­tri­b­u­tion or audi­ence size, at least not at the begin­ning. You’re not going to become an overnight sen­sa­tion on YouTube. In fact, for­get YouTube. Host your video wher­ever you’d like — YouTube, Vimeo, Ourmedia.org, Blip.tv, Magnify.net, Vid­dler, Face­book, Flickr (and Tube­Mogul will let you blast out to a dozen or more sites all at once) — but don’t worry if your first videos only get a cou­ple of dozen views. That’s par for the course. Only a very tiny per­cent­age of pro­duc­ers make income from their videos, at least today. Mark Day offered a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment that most of us do care about the size of our audi­ence. True, but a smaller and tar­geted group of view­ers is more valu­able than an undif­fer­en­ti­ated mass view­er­ship in many cases.

• Don’t walk away. If you pub­lished a video you think is worth other people’s atten­tion, make sure you don’t just upload it and for­get about it. Pro­vide con­text by describ­ing its con­tents in words. Embed it on your blog. Engage peo­ple in the com­mu­nity about it. Be active by post­ing com­ments or adding other people’s videos as “likes” or “favorites.” The reci­procity of blog­ging applies in the video world, too.

Some of these tips don’t apply to higher-end pro­duc­tions like 5 Across. But most of us don’t have PBS’s pro­duc­tion budget.

In the case of 5 Across, the time from tap­ing to pub­lish­ing was four days, not bad for a 75-minute tap­ing that was pared down to more bite-size nuggets. Mark says he plans to host the show once a month focus­ing on a broad topic like cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism and the future of newspapers.

Watch the whole show or pick out the sec­tions that inter­est you most.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.