UPEI - BUS442.0

Well this semester, I have become well familiar with blogs. They have been around a while and I don’t think they are going to go anywhere soon. However, last weekend while browsing Youtube I found something kind of cool.

It looks as though many people are turning to Youtube to broadcast their thoughts. Heres an example:

I think this is really cool. This guy goes on here all the time and just makes videos telling stories and his random thoughts. If you check his profile, he has over 110,000 views and over 1,100 subscribers (much how we subscribe to RSS feeds)

It is pretty neat the interaction that goes on in these videos. In our blogs, when people post responses it is just their name and they are more or less anonymous. In this case, people are personally responding (some people wear masks though). I think the amount of interaction is really cool. Take the “Should I buy my son a beer” guy. He has 90 video responses to his simple question.

I think this is an aspect of Youtube that many people fail to recognize. People don’t use it to just post some dumb videos or music videos, they are beginning to use it as a blogging platform. This is the beauty of Youtube. Anyone with a $10 dollar webcam can create and share unique content with anyone for free.

I am not sure if this method of “vlogging” will catch on and become the next blogging, since there really isn’t much anonymity and privacy is such a huge issue these days but I think it is cool none the less.

I noticed this post a few days ago on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, it was called A Lot to Learn From Start Cooking. It is a site that literally shows you how to cook something by showing it using a step-by-step process. I’m a terrible cook so I particularly enjoyed this site. It has a ton of videos showing how to make a bunch of different sort of recipes. It shows you the quantities of each ingredient, tells you what kind of cooking supplies needed, how long it should take to cook/bake and of course it shows you what the final product should look like. This site is very beneficial to those people, such as myself, that are visual learners. Though the videos on the site are quick, you can pause it while you gather your things and follow along. It is also an added bonus to do things at your own pace.

Another awesome feature of this site is that you can view the videos many different ways, through iTunes, RSS readers, TVTonic and you can also receive emails with the new recipes and demos available. 

While I thought this was a great site, it sure isn’t the only one out there. There are millions of other instructional videos on the web. You can pretty much think of anything and there will be a video on how to do it, whether you want to watch it or not is another story. YouTube has some out there, but I find that they are either not of particular good quality, and they are randomly added and inconsistent. It amazes me on how reliant we have become on the web to show us how things are done. In the past it was pretty easy to pick up a cooking book or phone a friend for a recipe for example and now it is just that much easier to look it up on the web instead.

Jen

Well just thought i’d post this here. In Chapter 5 we made references to Youtube, Creating Content, Remixes, etc etc. Well my friend is in a contest to win his tuition at UNB next year, and he needs to make a Facebook group and the person with the best content and most members wins. We decided to make a re-make/parody of the popular internet video “My New Haircut” (if you haven’t seen it it is all over Youtube) I think it turned out a bit better then Tasia’s Daft Hands. (No Offense Tasia ) Here it is: 

While reading through the TechCrunch blog, I found an interesting post regarding Youtube. For a few years now Youtube has pretty much been the leader in online video content. It is really an exceptional model, as mostly all the content is created by the users, who upload their videos to the site. However, one thing that Youtube is currently lacking is live streaming video. It looks as though that this will change sometime this year, and that they will begin to offer live streaming videos on their site.

I think that this will open up a whole new world of online media. I can think of a few uses for this technology which will be very beneficial…. For example, I know a few years ago when they were just launching PantherRadio, a web radio station for UPEI Panther sports, they had streaming video on their minds but the cost of bandwidth made it very expensive. (They do have live streaming video now through Aliant). If Youtube were to offer live streaming video, what is stopping even smaller schools who can’t afford what UPEI has done to stream their games as well? Youtube is providing the platform, they just need the users to provide the content.

It could also mean a whole new form of blogging for people. Take a guy like Seth Godin, his audience is already there and he has a following, so what would be stopping a guy like him from creating his own live “show” weekly?

When this is implemented, everyone could be a talk show star if they wanted. I think this is long past due on Youtube’s part, and it will be very interesting to see how it pans out.

 -dc