YouTube was the easiest of the new web 2.0 features for me to try out– and to spend time wandering. When the Nelinet crew brought their show to Vermont, I saw “Let’s Go,”– and it seems like that same week, someone sent me the Montpelier boys singing their rap, 802. And NPR alerted me to “The Evolution of Dance,” and the New York Times sent me over to YouTube to watch early movie clips when a star died.
Web video is clearly of the moment. Mara’s review of the history shows just how fast this phenomenon has happened. I’m not quite ready to buy the Flip, the tiny video camera that takes five minute clips– but I know it would be a huge hit if it turned up in Christmas stockings this December.
An old friend described to me her office IT person coming in and removing all the sound speakers to the office computers, and I thought WHOA. Those are a part of my life, and it’s legit– that’s how I heard the new ALA National Library Week clips. That’s where I watched the library drill teams perform. That’s the web conferencing, the webinars, the easy way to hear speakers and see their presentations even if I didn’t make it to New Jersey, New Mexico, or New York. The webinars, etcetera, are not on YouTube– it’s just that YouTube is a really easy way to get hooked up with the current visual world. Guess I got sidetracked there for a minute.
For this assignment I reviewed all the innovative library tools and thought about how many VT libraries posted to I love my library, the Gale contest. They could create a virtual tool for the library website too– or a contest. (Too bad TV and YouTube have given us such high standards– I thought the some of the contest entries were SO terrible!) While I was on YouTube watching the catalog/PC & Mac parody, I realized I didn’t remember the original PC and Mac ads. And, of course, they were on YouTube also.
