YouTube Stars!

As mentioned in our last post, the second San Franciso YouTube Gathering took place last weekend. There have been many videos uploaded that show what happened at the event. Here is a collection of some of the best videos of this YouTube Gathering.

First, an interesting new item. It has just been reported that Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube, recently stated that live streaming video would be added to the list of featured offer by YouTube by the end of this year. Of course, these capability is already available to users of StickAm and LiveVideo. In fact, I watched parts of the live feed of the event on LiveVideo last weekend! I put up the link to this live feed in our last post; I hope you got a chance to check in and see what was happening! Live streaming video is just another reason to sign up with LiveVideo, even if you already have a YouTube account. Please click on the blue "Less Tube. More You!" ad in the upper left corner of this page to go to LiveVideo.

In one of the videos below, a new website is mentioned - TubeCloud. Go there and enter a YouTube channel name and it goes in the cloud. The more people that enter that channel, the bigger the tag in the cloud. Its basically a tag cloud of YouTubers. Click here to nominate my YouTube channel on TubeCloud. Here's another person to nominate on TubeCloud, TiffanyJoAllen. She's a rising YouTubStar singer that we've mentioned here before.

Now, on to the San Francisco YouTube Gathering Video! (Beware of language in some of these videos!)

Labels: Castaa, community, eNation, gathering, kenrg, olgakay, PeriUrban, renetto, smpfilms, tlg847, YouTube Gathering

posted by KennyCrane at 2/29/2008 04:57:00 PM 1 Comments

Oprah Winfrey, the popular American talk show host, now has a YouTube channel. She joined on November 1st and has almost 20,000 subscribers already. She has posted 18 videos, most are commercials for her show. Her most watched video is "Oprah's Message to YouTube!" with just under 1.1 million views. The video allows comments on approval and so far, only 22 comments made it through. Embedding is disabled and Video Responses seem to be disabled.

The YouTube community has reacted with ambivalence to Oprah's new channel. Some think it will bring new viewers for everyone's videos. But others object to Oprah's apparent "one-way conversation" - she seems to want to advertise to us without accepting feedback. It has also been lamented that the "golden age" of YouTube is over. With the corporate accounts racking up lots of viewers, its hard to get on the most discussed or most viewed lists without resorting to histrionics and sensationalism. YouTube seemed more like a commuity of videomakers before "partners" came on to advertise to us. But, all this was inevitable. YouTube was spending millions on the computer power and bandwidth necessary to provide this free service to the uploaders and viewers of the thousands of new videos posted weekly on the site.

How will the Oprah channel and the other corporate partners affect YouTube and the community of vloggers and viewers? Time will tell. So far, everyone seems to have their opinions on Oprah's debut. Out of the massive number of Oprah related videos, we've chosen a few to highlight here. They are all intelligent and insightful; please watch them and get into the discussion yourself!

Labels: backlash, Channel, community, Corporate, feedback, Oprah, partner, Winfrey, YouTube

posted by KennyCrane at 11/09/2007 05:17:00 AM 2 Comments

This is a copy of a post made to the 2BuxMall Blog.


Periurban and Renetto, two popular YouTube videomakers, have recently made videos about a meeting they had in which a new video sharing concept was discussed. This new concept may seek to fix some of the problems that the YouTube users community has been experiencing, such as communication problems via video comments and YouTube messages, and abuse of some of the Terms of Service by many members. This new concept may also lead to individual ownership of their own channels and a democratic system of governing the operations.

From what I am able to see, this new concept seems to be a very good idea! It is worth trying, and I am very interested to see if this concept is implemented and to see what they put in place to deal with some of these issues.

Our 2BuxMall system addresses some of these same issues. We hope to roll out the system in a slow and orderly manner, addressing issues as they develop. 2BuxMall Store owners are selected by invitation only, so we can match the volume of business with our ability to provide the community with good service.

Individual owners will have a good deal of control over their own Stores. They can customize its appearance and decide what to promote or sell. We intend to provide a micropayment system to make it easy to pay for purchases made through our system.

I don't think our system could be classified as being run in a democratic way. It will be the case that everyone who becomes a user will have been invited by someone who already is a user. We feel that responsible community members will recommend other responsible people for invitation. There will also be a Level system which may help people to feel a certain amount of trust in users who have moved up in Level, which would indicate that they are active and positive members of our community.

I think that any discussion of the way in which positive people can group together in a community that can be helpful to themselves and others, is a good discussion to have! Here are the videos from Periurban and Renetto on this subject. We hope to participate in this creation of a better experience for the videomaking community.


An Open Letter To Renetto (Periurban)


If you can't see the video above, watch it on YouTube.


The Future of YouTube... is it really up to us? (Renetto)


If you can't see the video above, watch it on YouTube.

Labels: 2Bux, 2BuxMall, community, future, PeriUrban, renetto, YouTube

posted by KennyCrane at 4/18/2007 11:32:00 PM 0 Comments