Went fishing...

Seemed like an appropriate title to describe my experience with Task #2: Streaming. It is just way too easy to spend way too much time on YouTube!!! Quite remarkable, the amount of stuff that's on there. I played around with the various search functions and was amazed at how many words I threw in yielded a result.

On to the "assignment"... Actually, my first search was somewhat fruitless. Taking a lead from Library Lady's cooking theme and TV examples, I tried to find a classic SNL sketch -- Julia Child cutting up a chicken. All I could find was a spoof of this, which I didn't bother viewing; but, I did get an omelette making lesson courtesy of the "real" Ms. Child!

I then thought of comedy and politics -- a natural combination ;) -- and decided to test out whether one of my favourite old shows, Yes, Minister (or later, Yes, Prime Minister) was too obscure for YouTube. It wasn't. Here's a clip I found particularly enjoyable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yhN1IDLQjo.



Thinking of more recent -- the Yes, Minister stuff is still very "current" -- and more local political comedy, I checked out the 22 Minutes content. Found this clip spoofing Facebook (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kerC5AG2IaE), which reflects some of my own biases against it. Okay, uninformed biases, which will be addressed in a future assignment ;)

Anyway, to complete this assignment... I'd imagine that YouTube is most popular for its entertaiment value, for the ability of like-minded people to share information, and for exhibitionists. Seriously, while there's fun stuff on there, and informative stuff, there's also a lot of junk -- topic wise and audio/video quality wise -- and I have to wonder how some people have so much time on their hands! And I saw only a very tiny tip of the iceberg! As for myself, I will probably avoid visiting too often; while it was fun to be entertained, I spend enough time at a computer ;) However, I was quite surprised by some of the educational "programming", and will now think to search there when researching a subject, particularly a "how to" type of demo. I could easily see using the streaming technology on our work web site; however, I don't that we would publish to YouTube. In fact, as I was browsing, I couldn't help but wonder about issues of copyright and intellectual property.