YouTube: An Icon for Web 2.0
Wikipedia describes Web 2.0 as being a “trend in the World Wide Web technology” which encompass such elements as: sites for social networking (other sites are: emailing, blogging, wikis, newsgroups, etc.) and other services that help: creating web-pages, web-hosting, designing, or creating group-gathering “rooms”; users socialize, debate, discuss, analyze, or share information. (Web 2.0, 2008).
One of the components of Web 2.0, though not one of the newest features, is YouTube. This site enables users to share videos. Wikipedia’s description of YouTube is a “website where users can upload, view, and share video clips”; it goes on to cite that the site was started in 2005 by three people employed by a company which eventually became part of “eBay.” The website became wildly popular, featuring a wide variety of film clips from movies, TV, and personal content.
People who subscribe to the service are permitted to upload the clips; non-subscribers are permitted to view and share clips but not upload them. Some clips are restricted; videos with questionable content can only be viewed, shared or uploaded by those individuals who are at least 18 years of age. Though not restricted from being posted, pornography or those clips which may contain offensive material are prohibited from being uploaded from the site.
Wikipedia reports that in June of 2006, over 2 billion videos were watched in that month, alone, and 50,000 more were added per day in May 2006; that number increased to 65,000 (per day) by July of that year.
In August of 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube boasted a half million subscribers and had an impressive showing of over six million videos. (Wikipedia, 2008).
what-is-what.com states that as of 2007, the video-hosting website is one of the ten most popular sites on the Internet and says that YouTube has 20 million users, most of which are teens and young adults. This article reports that though most of the videos are of amateur quality and content, large companies and corporations such as CBS, Sony, Universal, and Warner are allowing YouTube to license copyrighted material from them.
This article also brings out the point that although the website tries to ban pornographic content, videos of questionable and morally objectionable clips do make it on the marquee. For this reason, the website has been banned from some countries (Turkey, India, and Brazil are just a few), along with many schools and libraries. (what-is-what.com, 2008).
YouTube is known to many of the “Gen X’ers”, virtually all of the Millenials” and is still a thing of “awe and wonder” to a majority of us “Baby Boomers.” I’ll admit that my knowledge of this website was extremely limited, though I confess that a few good friends of mine found it and are completely enamored of it—some have even submitted personal clips! Yikes! I had heard of the site but hadn’t spent much time there since my first experience involved amateurish home videos of late teens or early twenty-something’s getting extremely drunk and falling off sofas—not my “thing”, if you know what I mean (actually, one young man shook a bottle of soda and stuck the open end up his nose, laughing hysterically as the bubbly stuff shot up into his brain and exited through his other nostril; a note here: if I had been in his place, my brain would have exploded and there would have been no material for the film clip—end of story. And I guarantee that there would have been very little humor on my part). For this reason, I chose to give this site another peek, just to confirm or refute the impression I formed after my first experience.
When visiting this site, I watched videos on how to do salsa dancing, belly dancing (3 types of “the shimmy” (I’d be in bed for a week after attempting any of the 3), how to balance 2 forks on a toothpick from the lip of a glass, and how to make a toothpick star from a collection of toothpicks and a drop of water. Although I enjoyed the videos, I often do not have the time to sift through and select clips that would interest me.
The link to my annotated bibliography is:
http://tinyurl.com/2nzuak
References
What is YouTube?http://what-is-what.com/what_is/youtube.htm
Wikipedia. YouTube.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
Wikipedia. (2008). Web 2.0.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2
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Someone could definitely spend hours on YouTube looking at all the different videos. I commented on Susan's blog that Flikr is an excellent example of how Web 2.0 can allow a company to turn a profit while still providing a valuable service to mankind. YouTube definitely falls into the same category.
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