double halves

I promise this entry will be short and easy.

I've been spending some serious time on YouTube writing to people whose videos I like - trying to get them to pay attention to me. Pay attention to me! Waaaaeeinnhh! Waaaaiyngh! (I just realized that this is one of those words it is impossible to write - the nasal "wah" noise people make when imitating a babies whiney cry?)

Anyway - there is a "blog" function on YouTube and so of course I had to test it out.

my youtube blog

Note that I just started doing this so I only wrote about a few videos.

There are some problems with the YouTube blog:

One - you can only display two entries on your homepage. People often look at your homepage, but rarely go on to follow links. This is too bad - if for some reason it needs to be automated, there should be at least 5 or so, but it would be best if we could decide how many to display.

Two - it only lets you display a short paragraph. This is consistent with the rest of YouTube - as though they were trying to keep the dialogue dumbed down to the kind of sloganistic blurbs so common on the mainstream tv news. This is a bummer because there is a lot to say about some of the videos.

Three - the videos are played smaller than they would normally and without the option of enlarging them to fullscreen without navigating away. Bloggers don't ever want their readers to navigate away.

I think YouTube has a lot of problems in general. One of my videos (in another account) is "flagged" even though it does not violate the terms of service (it's a political horror movie). There is a lot of censorship, the compression is a serious bummer, the view counts and number of messages in your in-box are not updated in any kind of rational fashion, the featured videos are not curated well, the advertizing is offensive (in that it's advertizing), etc. But I'm only giving a crit because I love YouTube as a new kind of media.

I know this is nothing new, but I'm over the fact that I can find (whatever I want), and am engaged in a kind of more focused search - I have been chasing down experimental drawing and poetry videos and discovering dozens of creative people who are doing something worth watching. I think YouTube is an invaluable catalyst for change in video art, and brings creative people together to share their work. Amazing. I also feel like there is a cerain kind of aesthetic being promoted among video artists on YouTube that relates to the format and context - well, actually a number of different new genres (an obvious example - the new genre of watching the creation of a digital drawing emphasizes the process of drawing rather than the finished product in a very direct way - nothing new perhaps to people who have been to art school, but that the general public would find this interesting is an absolutely beautiful positive sign!). Has anyone explored this in depth I wonder?

So, that was "short and easy" - excuuuuuuse me! Broken promises...