#21 Youtube

Youtube has been a favorite of mine for a while. The sheer variety of things to be found is amazing. Also I like the idea that anyone can post things. This video, for example, is the sort of thing my friend does when she'd bored. She's really into drawing things in a cartoon/Disney type style, and sometimes she puts them to music. I think her dream is to animate all of Les Mis with animal cartoons, and you can see some of the beginnings of that in her account.

I have an account myself and use it post random videos of my cat. I once also posted some videos I'd taken of some traditional dance I saw at an ikebana convention in Japan, that turned out to be surprisingly popular. I really only posted them for my own benefit, so I could go back and watch them easily later, but since there wasn't much more of that sort of thing on Youtube, they ended up getting 2500-6000 views each. I just finished the book Extras, by Scott Westerfeld, where the main character lives in a society where the economy seems to be based on a thing like Youtube popularity - post a video a lot of people watch, and you get paid more suddenly. I think those videos would have helped my financial situation dramatically for a few months. Too bad it was only a book!

I rather like Mel's idea of doing staff recs through Youtube. I'd make some! As long as we had a camera with a mic good enough to pick up my voice. I tend to read a lot of books that I think would be popular with the demographic most likely to be using Youtube, I think. I also like Al's idea of making some how-to videos on there, about express checkout and the reservation system. One that teaches them how to find all the good new DVDs that never actually get put on the shelf because they're always being checked out might be a good idea (as much as I don't want the 'competition' in the DVD reserving race, haha). I don't have any new ideas myself, I'm afraid, but those were such good ones I thought I'd just repeat them.