YouTube Review
YouTube is a video file sharing website, that can be used by anybody as long as they have an account with the site. With the standard free membership a user can post their own videos, comment on others, and subscribe to users they enjoy watching. With a standard membership each user can set up their own personal profile with spaces for favorites, friends, and subscriptions to various users. Aside from the standard membership there are also various channels a person can sign up to be a part of, comedian, director, non-profit, musician, and guru. The comedian a musician profiles include space for the user to post upcoming shows and booking information. On the director profile a video log is included so a user can have unlimited videos on their profile, in addition to the standard video log that any user can have access to. The guru channel is for experts in any field to post instructional videos, this can be anything from how to rebuild your Chevy engine, to how to post videos on YouTube. And the non-profit channel is a place for non-profit organizations to have access to free advertising to help spread the word about their organization or cause.
Some of the positive features of the YouTube website are that anybody can post material, making it possible for a musician or other young artist to reach a much wider audience than they might if they were depending purely on live shows and the word of mouth of the people in their city. Also, it is very user friendly, to post a video one needs to set up an account and then follow the links to post a new video. There are two ways in which a video can be uploaded onto the YouTube site, by uploading a file from a computer the software used by the YouTube company converts the file from any player to be able to play from the site, it also creates a URL for the video so a person is able to post the video on any other website that has the capability to embed video. The second and newest feature is the Quick Capture button, this feature allows the user to post a video directly from their web-cam and the site saves and converts the file without one existing on the user’s personal hard drive.
The site also allows you to tag your video with certain key words that may apply to the subject matter of the video. This feature however can somehow have some negative ramifications, anybody can tag any word to any video they choose. Thus making it possible to tag adult content as something as innocent as “pony” or “music”. Also, to be removed from the YouTube site a video has to receive flags from users as inappropriate content, but until the video has been flagged a number of times the video is there for every user on the site to see. The content is not monitored during the upload process. However, any user posting inappropriate content will have his or her profile removed from the site.
When used appropriately the YouTube site can be used in many positive ways, allowing young artists to be heard, non-profits to share their mission, and for anybody to exercise some high tech self-expression. The community base that some of the more popular users have generated has turned YouTube into not just a video file sharing site but of a social networking site. Users are able to comment and message and also to add other members of the site as friends allowing users with similar interests to communicate and share their passions. Currently corporate channels on the site are starting to emerge allowing for people to pay for their videos to be posted on the most viewed and sponsored list which are at the very top of the homepage so they are very easy for the public to spot. Even with the corporate intrusion the site is still predominately user amateur videos of varied content.
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