YouTube

If you haven't seen it already, the third installment of the infamous slideshow, "What The F**ck Is Social Media?" has been published over at Slideshare by Marta Kagan. Since I'm a sucker for good visual communication or any good communication for that matter, I highly recommend flipping through it as it's both informative and entertaining. And it contains a few updated stats:

On July 10, 1962, Telstar I was launched, the first communications satellite to transmit live television across the Atlantic. The term Global Village was coined at about the same time by Marshall McLuhan in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). McLuhan was referring to the effect of radio in the 1920s which brought people together faster, and more intimately.

Not long ago, I was presenting along with some folks to the senior executive team at a large division of a massive insurance company. I had the great pleasure of listening to Eileen Naughton of YouTube, when she referred to Google as the operating system for search, Facebook as the operating system for social, Twitter as the operating system for real time and YouTube as the operating system for video. I found her characterization of the services fascinating and useful. 

I’m not sure what my favourite statistic is about YouTube. It could be, as we learnt today, that two billion videos are viewed every day. Or maybe it is the fact that this means that every minute we collectively upload 24 hours worth of video content to the site. Or that these videos mean that every 60 days more content is created on YouTube than has been aired in 60 years of programming on the main three US TV networks.

YouTube is five. It was on April 23rd 2005 that the first video was posted on YouTube. Now it has become a ubiquitous social media tool allowing people to share videos with each other, to comment on them and to sort and rate videos they enjoy. But why would people upload videos in the first place and what sort of videos do they upload. As YouTube turns five it is worth reexamining the nature of YouTube videos and the anthropology that is going on here.

A useful survey from global PR firm Burson-Marsteller this week looks at the ways in which the Global Fortune 100 companies are using social media. The tools they are using and how they are developing a social media strategy. The survey looked at 100 firms in the US, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and examined how these firms are using social media.

We are big fans of the work of Michael Wesch at FreshNetworks and have previously posted about his great presentation: An anthropological introduction to YouTube. His latest presentation builds on this and looks at the impact that social media sites such as YouTube has on society and also how society is influencing them.

by: Iqbal Mohammed

Yooouuutuuube is a site that allows one to watch Youtube videos (specified by URL or a random one) as a series of sequential frames placed one after the other.

There are a couple of options you can tweak to choose the resulting presentation (including the all important frame size) - but after you play a few vidoes this way, it may all seem too pointless or just another fun way to waste time.