**Introduction**
YouTube was named invention of the year for 2006 by Time magazine. It beat out a car that travels 3,000 miles on a single gallon of gas, a robot that can ride a bike and an umbrella that doesn’t get wet.
//“YouTube's creators had stumbled onto the intersection of three revolutions. First, the revolution in video production made possible by cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software. Second, the social revolution that pundits and analysts have dubbed Web 2.0. It's exemplified by sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg—hybrids that are useful Web tools but also thriving communities where people create and share information together. The more people use them, the better they work, and more people use them all the time—a kind of self-stoking mass collaboration that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet.//
//The third revolution is a cultural one. Consumers are impatient with the mainstream media. The idea of a top-down culture, in which talking heads spoon-feed passive spectators ideas about what's happening in the world, is over. People want unfiltered video from Iraq, Lebanon and Darfur—not from journalists who visit there but from soldiers who fight there and people who live and die there.//
//The videos may not be slick, but they're real—and anyway, slick is overrated. Slick is 2005. The yardstick on YouTube is authenticity.”//
During the recent military crackdown in Burma, the government shut down the Internet. I’m sure there were various reasons for this, but one cited in an NPR story on the incident was that the people of Burma were posting video of the violence online.
Interesting fact – The season finale of America’s most popular TV show in 2007 (American Idol) was viewed by approximately 30 million people. The most popular video of 2007 on YouTube (The Evolution of Dance) has been viewed nearly 60 million times.
**What can we do?**
* Watch videos
* Comment on those videos
* Rate videos
* Share videos via email
* Flag as inappropriate
* Post videos (create a channel)
* Post a video response (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zwbhAXe5yk)
* Mark as favorites
* Subscribe to other peoples videos
* Mark other users as “friends”
* Join and form groups
* Participate in video contests (Doritos Superbowl)
**What kind of Humanities Content can we find?**
Navigation on the site is primarily based on popularity.
Content is poorly organized.
“Categories” are not terribly useful.
Navigation is almost non-existent.
So, search is the primary means of navigation.
Search for “Galax Virginia”, “Intelligent Design”, “Race and Class”, “oral history”, “The Banana God”, “Where the hell is Matt?”
**The YouTube API**
With the YouTube API you can break your video content out of YouTube entirely and display it on your own site. [[http://www.virginiafolklife.org/|http://www.virginiafolklife.org]]
**Barriers to Entry**
You need a fast internet connection (DSL, Cable, etc.) to participate in this community. Video just doesn’t work over a slow connection.
Participation as a viewer has a very shallow learning curve.
Digital video production has gotten easier and easier over the years. YouTube’s ethos of authenticity over polish makes this even truer for the site.
**Demographics**
* 63 million visitors a month, 16 million from the US (comscore Oct. 2006)
* Currently 4th most popular site in the world according alexa.com behind yahoo, msn and google
* 50/50 male to female ratio
* 50%+ 35-64 age bracket
* 60% of YouTube viewers in that age range make $60k+
(compiled from comscore, hitwise and Nielsen)
See Also:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Online_Video_2007.pdf (page 9)
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Online_Video_2007.pdf (page 12)
**Alternatives to YouTube**
Veoh – Higher quality video, seems to be no time constraint [[http://www.veoh.com/|http://www.veoh.com]]
Blip TV
Meta Café
**Ideas for how we can leverage You Tube as Humanities Councils**
Start posting videos!
Create a Humanities TV YouTube channel we all share
Create a Humanities TV website the synthesizes and organizes all our YouTube feeds
From Pew:
//While music videos may be created primarily for entertainment, videos with educational//
//content are equally as popular among the general population of internet users, and even//
//more so for older adults.//
