Saturday, February 04, 2012

Line of the Day: 2012-02-04

Fond memories:

I discovered the pleasures of YouTube around this time. Someone sent me a link to a music video, and I followed it to the site. The whimsical D.I.Y.-ness of the home page, with its clutter of clickable offerings, many sophomoric in nature, made the place feel like a college dorm. Adorable babies, angry cats, embarrassing falls, and child prodigies mingled with the music videos and great concert footage of bands I loved performing at their peak. I e-mailed links to my friends. One of them wrote back, “This is like public television was supposed to be!”

That's from Ryan John Seabrook's New Yorker piece in the Annals of Technology, "Streaming Dreams: YouTube turns pro." Haven't finished it yet (511: I'm reading the print edition in chunks, when nature calls, the way Harold Ross would have wanted it), but so far, so very good.

Seabrook also has a related blog post featuring videos from the dawn of (YouTube) time.

[Added] In Comments, nice guy Steve M. points to another article about YouTube for your reading pleasure.

4 comments:

bjkeefe said...

I'm sorry I used the word "chunks" there.

Steve M. said...

You might also be interested in this Time story about YouTube, which also discusses its ongoing weirdness (although from the point of view of "Can it get un-weird enough to make huge amounts of money for Google?").

bjkeefe said...

Thanks, Steve. I will check it out.

bjkeefe said...

That's a nice wrinkle on the usual stats one hears about how much YouTube is used per minute:

More video is uploaded to YouTube every month than has been broadcast by the three big TV networks in the past 60 years.

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