Thing 20: YouTube

I think YouTube is great. You often hear people deride it as being full of drivel, but you know what? It actually restores my faith in people's creativity. Yes, a lot of what is posted is of no interest to anyone but the poster and a few of his or her friends or family members. But so what! The people who the video was intended for will enjoy it; the rest of us can ignore it!

There is also great stuff on YouTube that in my opinion beats the heck out of most network programming. Really creative people now have an outlet without needing a lot of money, and without needing to fit their content into some sort of format that fits on tv between commercials.

I think a great example of this is Dan Brown, the Lincoln high school student who recently won a YouTube contest with his video demonstrating how to solve a Rubik's cube. He has posted over 70 videos and has developed a huge following (over 19,000 subscribers). His videos run the gamet from comedic rants at his friends to a presidential endorsement, but all are impressive in their own way. See for yourself!

Other folks have already pointed out some of the cool library videos out there on YouTube, so I won't spend a lot of time on them. I will say I think it would be cool for a library to videotape patrons talking about books they've read, and then posting them to a library YouTube account and the library website.

Just for fun I did a search on YouTube for the tag CIL2008 - which I know folks are using to tag material from the Computers in Libraries 2008 conference. Take a look at the results and see if you can spot a couple NLC staff members!

For my finale I was going to embed into this blog post a video that I uploaded to YouTube. Unfortunately, it looks like I disabled the "embed" option in my account, and I can't remember or track down my password at the moment to get in and change it. So you will just have to follow this link if you want to see my "channel."

(Disclaimer: My videos definitely fall into the "only of interest to friends and family" category. But hey, it was me experimenting with two things for the first time - taking movies with my digital camera and uploading videos to the web!)