Chapter 20: In which the Pirates go slumming

If you think of the Internet like a city, its easy to picture the city in terms of districts. News and business sites are 'downtown', personal websites and DIYs are the residential district, and eCommerce is obviously the marketplace. And like most cities, the Internet has its red light district. Unfortunately for the Internet though, this city also has slum. An area so bad even the red light district stays away. Here in Seattle I think of Burien, White Center, Boulevard Park, and West Seattle. On the Internet, its YouTube.

Now, like Burien and West Seattle, YouTube certainly has some good things. Burien has (or had?) a great sub shop attached to their Fred Meyer, and Boulevard Park has a nice beach (nevermind that my car was broken into there). YouTube has plenty of gems, too. Videos like Adventure Time, which I posted about a long while back, and the PG-rated 300 Trailer. Rob Paravonian, a musical comedian from the east coast, has a bunch of clips on YouTube and they're brilliant! And when the BBC doesn't have them taken down, as they often do, there's more than enough Top Gear clips to whet your appetite. But thats not what YouTube is really about. YouTube is about social networking, much like many of our previous Web 2.0 sites have been, and thats where the true Renton-ness of YouTube shines through.

Blogs like this one, and the millions of others out there, are often about sharing your thoughts and opinions with anyone out there that can track you down. But due to the nature of the Internet, and the many different blog sites out there, most of the time what you post on your blog is yours and yours alone. It isn't splashed on the front page of many different websites, enticing their users to read what you said. And rarely does anyone bother to 'steal' your blog post and use it as their own. But YouTube and many sites like it, tend to glorify random video blogs by posting them all over the front page. The social networking aspect of tags also means some of the most random videos you've ever seen will show up as related links to an amusing video you found. This means more and more people, mostly teenagers whose legal rights and privacy in these instances are in question as it is, are competing to be on the front page. So you've got plenty of guys and girls treating YouTube as their own personal strip show. You've got people so in need of attention that they advertise their cell phone number just to see how many people will call them. And you've got people posting video of their 'friends' at their most vulnerable, probably without concent. Its attention whoring at its worst, and the format is only becoming more popular as time goes on.

So how does this relate to Library 2.0? To be honest, it doesn't. Online video streaming does, but YouTube and its ilk do not. So lets talk about Streaming video content! As mentioned in today's Learning 2.0 description, streaming video has improved greatly over the past few years. So much in fact that most major TV networks now offer their regular TV content through their website as well! And in some cases, it actually looks better. HD broadcasts on a non-HD TV don't look any better than a non-HD broadcast. But an HD broadcast on a good computer monitor will look spectacular. And with this improvement comes the ability to distribute content to more and more people! Content like KCLS's own Story Time with Dewey and Sketch are a perfect example of how local content can be distributed globally. Through streaming video, many of the Dewey and Sketch story times are available for free, without a library card, straight through our website.

The same kind of approach can be taken with many of our events. Book talks, author visits, and seminars that are hosted at our local libraries can be recorded and shared through our website. This is also a wonderful way for local teens to become involved! Invite them to give book talks for their favorite books. YouTube proves just how much teens enjoy recording their thoughts for the Internet to see, why not harness that enthusiasm?