Thing #20

Ah, YouTube. I've already spent countless hours, either alone or crowded around the monitor with friends, looking at random stuff like commercials from my youth, clips from TV shows, music videos, and all kinds of other ridiculous stuff. Millions of people are using it, and it's referenced on TV, radio, news, and in passing conversation all the time. It's here in a big way, and it's here to stay.

YouTube is designed in a way that is effective at keeping you browsing. You can browse the categories, or you can look at the related videos shown with a selected video. I know I've spent plenty of time hopping from video to video. For this exercise, I looked around for library-related videos, and I came across this one, which I had seen linked several months ago in a library blog. It's so cute! This library system made it for an in-service, and I think it's such a great example of all the different types of library staff and the different things they do.


It's hard to say where YouTube will go. It began as a way for average people to easily share their videos, but it's getting so huge that I predict commercial interests will increasingly interfere with the DIY community aspect of it. There is also of course the heated issue of copyrighted material. I actually know a friend who works for a company that pays him and others to scour YouTube and send take-down notices for copyrighted material. As we've seen with the older issue of MP3 file-sharing, people can and will share their files, whether its copyrighted or not, so it will be interesting to see how these types of sites struggle to be user-friendly while at the same time restrictive of what goes up.