23 Things #20 YouTube

Okay, who hasn’t heard of YouTube? The place is filled with all kinds of stuff, all kinds of videos have been uploaded there, stuff from around the world, so talk about going global!

Anyhoo, personally I am addicted to Taiwanese and Japanese dramas that you can find uploaded there. Some of them just make me laugh, so much like GTO. A great show I highly recommend you check out. Or if you are looking for something that will make you cry like a baby, even you big, tough guys, check out One Litre of Tears. 

What I am most amazed by is how there is an entire subculture that works to make these dramas available to the public. They literally spend their free time not just downloading and uploading them to YouTube, but translating them and subtitling them into English. The work some of these groups do is often phenomenally good. They also tend to give themselves or their team cute names or cool names depending on how you look at it.

YouTube has a lot of other functions built in besides just viewing videos, you can e-mail videos to your friends or paste your favorite video into a blog, website or your friends’ MySpace site. You can post comments to videos that are on the site. If you create an account not only can you upload your own videos, but you can subscribe to watch some videos that won’t be listed on the public end of the site or you can share videos you are watching at the same time with other users like your friends.

Other aspects of YouTube that are pretty cool is the Video Toolbox where they actually teach you how to make a good video for the internet. They have tricks about editing, lighting and other production tips.

If you have some technical chops behind you, then they have the API available for if you want to create your own mashup or plugin. Just check out their Developer Corner. Which for me personally, the great find being a YouTube plugin someone created for Wordpress. Now that is cool!

Other things YouTube is working on can be found in their TestTube area. Some cool finds are floating around here if you weren’t aware that YouTube was about more than just looking at stupid videos people have posted. Two that sound really promising here are Remixer and AudioSwap, one seems to be a way to edit your video and another allows you to use music from “officially licensed sources” in your video.

Yeah, YouTube is a lot of fun. Power to the people!

One final thought before I skedaddle. Apparently YouTube isn’t the only video uploading site out there, no I’m not talking GoogleVideo or anything like that. No, apparently there are numerous video uploading sites out there, but YouTube just happens to be the giant gorilla that everyone notices. I haven’t checked out many of these other sites, but I’m sure many of them have their good points.

Oh, and finally if you are looking for a lot of cool stuff that happens to be in the public domain and you might want to use it to make your own creations check out the Internet Archive.