YouTube.

A while back I was browsing some of my sites and I noticed that a lot of video-sharing sites have followed the naming trend of YouTube, resulting in countless sites named Something-Tube.


The internet really is a series of 'tubes. Thanks Mr Stevens.


YouTube is a video-sharing site. It's very simple really, people create accounts (you need to have an email to do this, or if you have a Google account, you can use that account to sign in) and then they upload their videos to YouTube's server. There are filters and screening processes and user report functions in place so that videos with explicit content don't make it onto YouTube.

There are however more complex features to YouTube that can be explored. Users can create channels to showcase their own videos and any videos that they may have "favourited" these are then subscribed to and YT will send the users that have subscribed notices when changes are made to the channel. Users can friend one another, comment on videos and on channels (although be wary of the GID Theory, as it has shown itself to be a problem on YT). In addition, if you value your privacy, you can elect to have your videos only viewable by people on your friend list and you can elect to disable commenting on your videos. Recently, YouTube has allowed users to place captions and annotations on their videos and some people have managed to use them in some innovative ways.

I feel that one should always exercise caution when searching on YouTube becuase while you can find helpful, informative videos on a phenominal range of topics, you will most likely have to wade through quite a few videos which are pointless, silly or ultimately unrelated to what you were looking for. The "Reccomended for You" section of the YT home page always reminds me of this, as it very rarely has anything in it that I want to watch, despite being generated for me based on my video watching patterns.

Here is where I would try to embed the video which I recorded for this class, but I'm having trouble uploading it. (It takes forever and keeps giving me errors.) Hopefully one of these times it will work and I'll be able to embed it here, but until then, I'll leave you with a one of my favourite videos



Enjoy your YouTube!

Piff