Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Thing #20: YouTube and video sharing

We're down to the last FOUR things! Congratulations on making it this far!

Thing #20: You Tube and online video sharing




Online video hosting sites have exploded over the past few years, allowing users to easily upload and share videos on the web. YouTube served 79 million users with three billion videos in January of 2008 alone! The site allows users not only to upload their own video content easily, but also embed clips into their own sites. Do some searching around YouTube yourself and see what the site has to offer. You'll find everything from 1980s TV Commercials to the YouTube-sponsored 2008 Presidential Debates. There's even a teaser trailer for this year's Big Read selection, My Antonia by Willa Cather! Of course, like any free site you’ll also find a lot stuff not worth watching, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore and see for yourself what the site has too offer. Libraries are using YouTube for publicity and to connect with patrons. Check out St. Joseph County Public Library's A Day in the Life of a Public Library video and McCracken County Library's ad for their storytimes.

To complete Thing #20:
1) Explore YouTube and find a video you like.
2) Create a blog post about your experience. What did you like or dislike about the site and why did you choose the video that you did? Can you see any features or components of the site that might be interesting if they were applied to library websites? If you're feeling ambitious, try using YouTube's embed code to post a video on your blog (make sure you're in the edit HTML tab in Blogger's composer for this).

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