Let's try embedding a vid and see if it works.
Showing posts with label YouTube. Show all posts
Showing posts with label YouTube. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Tubular
Two and a half hours of my life that I will never get back.
That's what I just spent poking around YouTube, looking at silly videos with, shall we say, minimal production values. An awful lot of bandwidth is being used to show the world jerky amateur films of college boys doing bad Paula Deen imitations. And worse.
And yet. It had never occurred to me that I could use YouTube to view a clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. Now THAT could be useful, and I really haven't ever used the words "useful" and "YouTube" in the same thought or sentence before. I'm thinking about my student days as a history major and marvelling at how easy it would be now to view certain kinds of primary source material. No chattering projector required!
Other things I like about YT: it's kind of fun to find clips of live performances (although picture and sound quality are frequently dreadful), and to search for things like the name of your high school and see what you get. Fun, but not all that useful.
I don't like how there doesn't seem to be a great way to improve the precision of your search results. At least for the searches I did, there is always a lot of noise, and no obvious ways of whittling down your results, except by adding more search terms of course. Like all of Web 2.0, there's tons of dreck mixed in with the gold nuggets. Just because YouTube "doesn't allow" gross-out videos and porn doesn't mean I feel confident that I (or my kids) couldn't stumble across something icky that flew under their radar. And please, save me from the inane comments and vulgar language that seems to pass for discourse in much of the Web 2.0 world.
So I guess YouTube gets a mixed review from me. Of course we'll all be using the technology at work soon enough. But cute kitty videos, stupid human tricks, and flatulence wear thin after a while and all the silly and stupid stuff dilutes the power of YouTube, IMHO. Maybe the Google people could split YouTube into two sites: one for the America's Funniest Home Videos stuff and another for clips that perform a function other than making people laugh so hard they pee their pants.
That's what I just spent poking around YouTube, looking at silly videos with, shall we say, minimal production values. An awful lot of bandwidth is being used to show the world jerky amateur films of college boys doing bad Paula Deen imitations. And worse.
And yet. It had never occurred to me that I could use YouTube to view a clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. Now THAT could be useful, and I really haven't ever used the words "useful" and "YouTube" in the same thought or sentence before. I'm thinking about my student days as a history major and marvelling at how easy it would be now to view certain kinds of primary source material. No chattering projector required!
Other things I like about YT: it's kind of fun to find clips of live performances (although picture and sound quality are frequently dreadful), and to search for things like the name of your high school and see what you get. Fun, but not all that useful.
I don't like how there doesn't seem to be a great way to improve the precision of your search results. At least for the searches I did, there is always a lot of noise, and no obvious ways of whittling down your results, except by adding more search terms of course. Like all of Web 2.0, there's tons of dreck mixed in with the gold nuggets. Just because YouTube "doesn't allow" gross-out videos and porn doesn't mean I feel confident that I (or my kids) couldn't stumble across something icky that flew under their radar. And please, save me from the inane comments and vulgar language that seems to pass for discourse in much of the Web 2.0 world.
So I guess YouTube gets a mixed review from me. Of course we'll all be using the technology at work soon enough. But cute kitty videos, stupid human tricks, and flatulence wear thin after a while and all the silly and stupid stuff dilutes the power of YouTube, IMHO. Maybe the Google people could split YouTube into two sites: one for the America's Funniest Home Videos stuff and another for clips that perform a function other than making people laugh so hard they pee their pants.
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