Youtube

Now that I am not obligated to only talk about hemp on my blog, I figure I can talk about blogging. or video blogging.

As a college student (Sophomore? Junior?) I took a call entitled "Pop Culture". The professor was a cult favorite, and I learned why in his class. Assignments for class were both easy and encouraged creativity. The readings were bestsellers that you pick up and read a chapter of whenevner you loiter in Barnes and Noble.

For my final project which required a 15 page paper and a 15 minute presentation, I decided to be a little ambitious by strongly incorporating it into my life at the time.

At the time, I was clinically addicted to Youtube. I would browse videos for hours, going from video to video and clicking "add to favorites" on whichever ones I liked (youtube came before I was familiar with Digg, Stumbleupon, or del.ic.ious.) Before youtube, I had already seen many of the sites that led up to it (miscellaneous websites that have funny pictures or videos). Now, all of the sites were in one place and under one interface, and I never even had to open a window to browse, litterally, the best videos ever. I could watch skateboarding, police chases, America's Funniest, or homemade greats, all in one place.

I did my entire research project on youtube videos. My research was watching videos that had lots of views, and analyzing and trying to explain, why these videos had so many views. Mind you, this was back in the early days of youtube, when 100,000 views was actually a whole lot of views. I can't think of a single video that had more than 2,543,643 views at the time.

This was the glory days of Video Blogging. Blogs had been a "new thing" for the past two years, but were being pushed out by the new technologies like, podcasts and youtube. Now, Vlogers could simply film themselves instead of having to painstakingly edit individual blogs (why am I doing this right now?)

Youtube, which did not yet know how to operate, was full of mediocre videos of American's filming their own monologues. Ones that stuck out were Geriatric 27, Lonelygirl 15, and any attractive girl dancing. There whis was also the golden era for complilation videos, already popular for quite some time. I predict that this was the predecesor to the modern "FAIL".

Anyways, ( I see why bloggers talk so much), I did a whole lot of 'research', ie, watching youtube videos. Then, I made a video about youtube videos. I posted it as "Red Tube, Blue Tube, iTube, YouTube". I was making a reference to the new applications in politics; the Hilary Clinton 1984 commercial, AKA Vote Different, had just been released.

Little did I know at the time that Red Tube is also the name of a porn site.

Whether the video was actually great, or internet users love porn, (most likely a combination of the two but I'm leaning towards the latter) the video ended up with over.......... One Million views.
(Dr. Evil pinky in the mouth, followed by evil laugh)

Then, Youtube took it down because of copyright infringement on the Red Hot Chili Pepper's song, "Tell Me Baby"(bastards). This was before they made whatever deal they made that they run now.

Well, I reposted it on Vimeo. More on Vimeo later.