Thing 18 - You’ve surely noticed that I’ve already been peppering my blog with YouTube videos. So here’s another and I’ll explain why…
This is a clip from the 1982 cult film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. it’s a beautiful film, no matter how dytopic it may be. Anyways, I’ll always come back to this moment in the film if I get to thinking about complex information systems at work. I’ll let the imagery speak for itself.
YouTube is my go-to video content site. I also started to post small family videos on my own channel just a month ago. (YouTube.com/theZipfs) It integrates nicely with our Google identities, and since it is the premier video serving service on the Internet almost everything you could want to use works with it. (Including Tumblr, obviously!) However, you can on my channel that one of my five videos has been flagged for copyright violation. A song I had dropped in was picked up by filters and the sound was subsequently blocked. Oops!
Previous to this I had been serving the video files off of a webserver and linking to them accordingly. I also had to make sure I didn’t go overboard with the encoding, so that viewers would actually be able to see it. (These were QuickTime files exported for streaming purposes.) YouTube has made this much easier for me.
I see how YouTube could be of great value to any organization, with libraries being no exception to this. Presentations, demonstrations, marketing, or just about any other content you could think of… so long as it doesn’t violate copyright ;-)
And speaking of being legal with copyright and content, you can actually watch the entire Koyaanisqatsi film on YouTube… with the occasional commercial interruption, of course. NOTE: It’s HD and requires a bit of bandwidth.
