Not nerdy. Just passionate. Okay, maybe that is a little nerdy in and of itself.
Top Three Things I Love About Youtube:
1. Favorite childhood TV shows. Once you streaked home from school every day to sit on the couch with your eyeballs plastered to the screen, you knew exactly when they began and quoted lines until your family told you to shut up. Then you kept on quoting them and your siblings decided they weren't too fond of you anymore. Years went by, and you'd think about them from time to time, find yourself humming scraps of the theme song under your breath. You rented the DVD from the library once and went back through every episode, but aside from that, it's been absent from your life.
Suddenly, one day, you're a young adult sitting at the keyboard with absolutely nothing worthwhile to do. On a whim, you google the name of your show, just to see if there's a fan website or wikipedia page. Lo and behold, every single episode is available on youtube. You're overjoyed, even though they're twenty-two minute episodes chopped into annoying ten minute segments, so you have to watch that same Toyota commercial in order to watch the last minute and twenty-seven seconds.
For me, it was Redwall and Liberty Kids.
2. That lady who plays the grandma in the Julian Smith videos. Hilarious, satirizing, and stereotype defying. I heard she died. If that's true, the youtube community mourns her loss.
3. Video tributes! It's just mind-blowing to know somebody out there cares enough about something-a movie, that same treasured show, a book, a historical event-to spend days, hours, weeks creating a four minute multimedia masterpiece. It doesn't matter to them if they don't go viral, the purpose it to connect with a small, widespread population of fans. So what if it's only been viewed 473 times in two years? It's there to be one person's favorite video, that one they watch over and over until they have a sneaky suspicion about where the 73 came from.
Top Three Things I Don't Love about Youtube:
1. Watching a three minute commercial for a 1:32 video. Why?
2. Youtube millionaires hot shots. Fred's pretty funny, and the Annoying Orange isn't that bad, but they don't need their own TV show on Cartoon Network. They already have people watching.
3. Poorly made videos. If you're going to do a documentary, get a good camera and somebody who knows how to use it, possibly yourself. Then take clips of people doing things, causes and effects, insert relevant pictures. Do you think we want to watch a jiggly video of your mouth and your pores and your hand wiping your nose and your eyes staring down at the keyboard, all of it with your blank office wall and people screaming in the background? And you wonder why you haven't gone viral.
And then we've got the whole concept of going viral. It's everybody's dream, you admit it. Everybody thinks they can upload a video or start a blog or a tweet or a picture, and it will make history over the course of three days. Cute kittens go viral, a sixteen year old's sentence goes viral, a picture taken in Russia goes viral, and they aren't even worth looking at. Certainly you can do it, too.
There's a reason for that thinking. There's a reason it seems like everything you look at is viral. It's because you read the teasers on yahoo or msn, one of the top ten videos on youtube catches your eye. But that's all. You don't go digging for other things. When was the last time you went beyond the first page of google? Everything you look at is viral, because this 1/1,364,903 is all you look at.
Top Three Things I Love About Youtube:
1. Favorite childhood TV shows. Once you streaked home from school every day to sit on the couch with your eyeballs plastered to the screen, you knew exactly when they began and quoted lines until your family told you to shut up. Then you kept on quoting them and your siblings decided they weren't too fond of you anymore. Years went by, and you'd think about them from time to time, find yourself humming scraps of the theme song under your breath. You rented the DVD from the library once and went back through every episode, but aside from that, it's been absent from your life.
Suddenly, one day, you're a young adult sitting at the keyboard with absolutely nothing worthwhile to do. On a whim, you google the name of your show, just to see if there's a fan website or wikipedia page. Lo and behold, every single episode is available on youtube. You're overjoyed, even though they're twenty-two minute episodes chopped into annoying ten minute segments, so you have to watch that same Toyota commercial in order to watch the last minute and twenty-seven seconds.
For me, it was Redwall and Liberty Kids.
2. That lady who plays the grandma in the Julian Smith videos. Hilarious, satirizing, and stereotype defying. I heard she died. If that's true, the youtube community mourns her loss.
3. Video tributes! It's just mind-blowing to know somebody out there cares enough about something-a movie, that same treasured show, a book, a historical event-to spend days, hours, weeks creating a four minute multimedia masterpiece. It doesn't matter to them if they don't go viral, the purpose it to connect with a small, widespread population of fans. So what if it's only been viewed 473 times in two years? It's there to be one person's favorite video, that one they watch over and over until they have a sneaky suspicion about where the 73 came from.
Top Three Things I Don't Love about Youtube:
1. Watching a three minute commercial for a 1:32 video. Why?
2. Youtube millionaires hot shots. Fred's pretty funny, and the Annoying Orange isn't that bad, but they don't need their own TV show on Cartoon Network. They already have people watching.
3. Poorly made videos. If you're going to do a documentary, get a good camera and somebody who knows how to use it, possibly yourself. Then take clips of people doing things, causes and effects, insert relevant pictures. Do you think we want to watch a jiggly video of your mouth and your pores and your hand wiping your nose and your eyes staring down at the keyboard, all of it with your blank office wall and people screaming in the background? And you wonder why you haven't gone viral.
And then we've got the whole concept of going viral. It's everybody's dream, you admit it. Everybody thinks they can upload a video or start a blog or a tweet or a picture, and it will make history over the course of three days. Cute kittens go viral, a sixteen year old's sentence goes viral, a picture taken in Russia goes viral, and they aren't even worth looking at. Certainly you can do it, too.
There's a reason for that thinking. There's a reason it seems like everything you look at is viral. It's because you read the teasers on yahoo or msn, one of the top ten videos on youtube catches your eye. But that's all. You don't go digging for other things. When was the last time you went beyond the first page of google? Everything you look at is viral, because this 1/1,364,903 is all you look at.
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