YouTube

I have not checked out any of the other sites, but YouTube is a classic social software site. You can get email at YouTube, make "friends," chat via IM, and share videos. It is like the flickr of videos. I do not have a video camera on my cell phone so my only contribution was both a school assignment and a learning tool for 23 Things. Jessica and I made a little screencast tutorial for del.icio.us, that was supposed to be part 1 of 3, but we never made the next two. She has the scripts, though, which she wrote. Here's our YouTube link . You can also see the movie, embedded in this blog, or on the 23Things hints from the Staff Day 23 Things wiki. I also embedded a video a classmate put on his blog for class on to my blog; this is the best use of PowerPoint I've seen yet. I also embedded a YouTube video at the beginning of class (thanks to Jessica for showing me the vid for the first time; I had it embedded on my school blog before Staff Day). I was hoping to start a provocative discussion in the comments, but I think we were all too busy to fully engage.

I learned about YouTube about two years ago from a friend who was amazed at all the rare (many of them bootleg, of course) concert tracks and videos from bands we both liked. I loved the amazing variety of things you could watch and did see this site and the user-supplied content as a revolutionary change in "the tube," where people are active participants rather than only passive viewers (though many people will still be viewers only). I thought this before I ever heard of Web 2.0 or Library 2.0, though I never thought I would be making screencasts and embedding videos in blogs.