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valentine’s day, postsecret style
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the PostSecret thing, now ported to YouTube for Valentine’s day as a video montage complete with hipster ‘home-made’ animation: [the video is an advertisement for the books, btw, which is entirely appropriate for this made-up ‘holiday’] Happy Hallmark Card Day. Update: I didn’t realise how many Postsecret…
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can haz viral video?
The other day I had the pleasure of participating in this week’s episode of Spark, a CBC Radio One show on tech culture news and ideas. It was a lot of fun being part of such a smart show – yay, public service broadcasting, long may it reign. The full show and related info, links…
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Oprah, YouTube, and the YouTubers
[cross-posted at Propagating Media] So, Oprah has her own YouTube channel. I was very interested to see how the user community would respond to Oprah’s debut on the site, given the stirrings of discontent I’d been detecting recently around a perceived ‘dumbing down’, sensationalising or mainstreaming of the content that makes it to the top…
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LOL OMG (The YouTube Song)
The community of quasi-celebrity YouTube vloggers comes to life in this rip-off of the Beatles: Cute.
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further to the myspace/facebook class debate
Ah, the La Boite Theatre (which by the way has a kind of populist/grass-roots brand image but is situated in the hyper-modernist, rational and shiny Creative Industries Precinct here at QUT). Perhaps we should applaud them for doing their bit to keep MySpace bourgeios. But then again, first an iPod on the cover of their…
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Community responses to changes at YouTube
In my last post, I discussed YouTube’s roll-out of language options and localization, and aired some concerns I have about its cultural implications. This morning I had a quick look to see how the YouTube community has responded to the move. I’m a bit surprised there isn’t more discussion, celebration, or protest than there is,…
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Localisation, YouTube and Flickr
Via BigMouth Media – well, actually via late-night YouTube browsing, followed by the now-familiar exclamation “Oh, look, YouTube’s changed something (in the middle of the night) again!”: YouTube has released localised versions of its video sharing website in nine countries around the world. The countries that are getting the special treatment are Brazil, France, Ireland,…
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YouTube Research Gazette
Many thanks to all the people who responded via email to my request for information about current YouTube research projects relevant to content and genre analysis. I still have a few more leads to chase up, but vaguely in the spirit of FLOSS (where the second “S” is for scholarship, not software), I thought I’d…
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Help: Who is researching YouTube?
One of my current research projects is a collaboration with Joshua Green from the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. We’re designing a large-scale content analysis of YouTube, with the rather ambitious long-term aim of mapping the emergent genre system of the network. Part of the planning involves figuring out whether or not our intended…
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i’ve always said that old people rock
I know I’ve come to it a bit late, but I’ve just spent several minutes watching the Zimmers’ video over and over again, and smiling all the way. At one level, I like it because it is a much-needed demonstration of one way in which we might think about how to connect “expertise” with “amateur”…