Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Thing 20: YouTubing down the information highway

As you can see, I've been playing around with YouTube. Naturally, I looked for library related videos since I needed to limit my searches in some way. I stumbled across a video of a Second Life avatar skating on Info Island. That video gave me intriguing glimpses of the libraries themselves, so I explored some more and found this video tour of the whole Info Island Archepeglio. Actually, looking at these Second Life YouTube videos has gotten me intrigued about Second Life itself! Another benefit of doing 23 Things!

I suppose I should go watch something on YouTube of more substance, such as the Presidential candidate debates, but I find myself wanting to see all the silly things I've read about such as "Zombie Boy Likes Turtles" and so forth. I think that is one of the dangers of YouTube--there is a lot of dross mixed in with just a few videos with actual substantive content. But I suppose that is reflected in the rest of the world also.

I can see libraries using YouTube in many ways, but since there are so many videos on the service, it might be hard to get an audience.

2 comments:

Amy said...

The cool thing about YouTube, I think, is that it's just another publishing channel like a blog, albeit a really popular one. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of video producers you really like, or customize your RSS feed by getting a feed for a topic or tag. There's all the social tools--commenting, favoriting, sharing, etc. And it's a free place for libraries to host videos and embed them in their websites, like on my blog post 7 1/2 Habits. (I couldn't embed anything here, unfortunately, but this is a really fun library video: iACPL 3.0.) I think embedding looks great and every video on YouTube has a URL tag and an embed tag so that even if you have zero experience with building a website it's still really easy to put a video on your site and have it look good. And it's a free, easy way for libraries to incorporate multimedia into their own websites, even if the larger world doesn't pay attention. I'm going to have to look for the Second Life videos....

Annette said...

I'd never heard of it - informative blog!