You Can with YouTube

(Image courtesy: New Indian Express)

L Suresh explores the world of Vlogging, citizen journalism and the online video phenomenon.

A few days ago, Jamal Albaughouti was one of the many students pursuing his undergrad course in Virginia Tech University. A crazy shooting spree by a trigger-happy, mentally disturbed student led to an event that would put him in the limelight for the entire world to see. Jamal was the first to shoot a video of the scene of the crime at the Virginia Tech University. In minutes, he would send it to CNN. In half an hour, it would find its way on air and online. Over two million people would see the video in the next 24 hours.

Jamal is amongst the first of the breed of I-Reporters - a term coined by CNN - and the next in the line of citizen journalists who have been instrumental in bringing the incident to the notice of the world. Suddenly breaking news is no longer for the people – it is by the people. Their biggest weapon – the camera phone. Shoot videos, grab images, get online, host it on community vlogs, and send it to thousands - all from the scene of action. In a matter of minutes, news has been captured, processed and broadcast to the world - in a fraction of the time it would take a media house or a TV channel to do so.

Decades back, daredevil reporters crouched behind sandbags to get images of the war even as they risked their lives in the process. Just replace the sandbags with cars, buildings or a tree, and the flash bulb cameras with hi-tech mobile phones that let you shoot, surf and share – and you have a new generation of reporters who have no formal qualification for the job and yet are more than equipped to do it.

That’s why it doesn’t come as a surprise that the world’s most dramatic events in recent times have all been broken to the world by citizen journalists. From the time when an amateur videographer filmed the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, to the subway bombings in London, the tsunami in Indonesia, the firing at a Montreal school, the hanging of Saddam Hussein and now the Virginia Tech massacre – photos, videos and blog posts from cellular phones have opened out a new dimension of reporting that one didn’t credit today’s technology with.

Youth power, the internet era and mobile phones - together, they represent the holy trinity that guides the world of citizen journalism. According to a recent study by Pew Internet and American Life Project, 57 percent of teenagers who are online, create content for the internet. Another study determines that more than 79% of U.S. broadband Internet users watched video in 2006. Not surprising, considering the fact that it makes a lot more sense to follow a story on the net, through a blog or a vlog that updates news with clippings, images and points of view from all over the world in a matter of minutes – than wait for your favourite news channel to beam its coverage across, which is not only dated, but also ends up being repetitive for hours until the next feed comes in.

A 2006 survey conducted by GlobeScan has people rating news sources in order of importance - the television (56 percent), newspapers (21 percent), Internet (9 percent), and radio (9 percent). That the internet, a recent phenomenon, has caught up with the century-old radio speaks volumes of its fast-gaining popularity. Even as blogs began gaining in popularity, Tom Vilmer Paamand added a new dimension - and a new prefix – to the concept by updating his online diary from a cell phone. The moblog had come to stay. The evolution process had begun, to vlogs and all the other buzz words that we can learn from teenagers today – podcasting, phonecasting and video sifting.

This is where sites like YouTube have made a huge difference, making collecting, swapping, creating and hosting videos the flavour of the year. And as its tagline says, it’s all been about ‘broadcasting yourself’. Viral videos became the in-thing as each day saw over 65,000 new clips being uploaded and over 100 million clips being viewed.

Just how much of a good thing is YouTube? Take a look at the burgeoning competition and you’ll find out. If YouTube specializes in short video clips of a duration of 10 minutes or less, Joost, a website created by the team that founded Skype and Kazaa, offers television programmes on the net. Likewise, you could switch on to blip.tv to watch whole episodes online. Or download free software from Katch TV to watch your favourite channel. There are also the me-toos, like Metacafe, Dailymotion, MSN Soapbox, PhotoBucket and the Innertube from CBS. Plus the ones with a difference, like GoFish that specifies the kind of videos it would accept and the teen wonder Facebook, a favourite with college students, having over 19 million users and about 1.5 billion page views a day.

While the internet made rapid strides in the tech age, the third pillar of the triumvirate - the fancy gizmo that was, not too long ago, simply referred to as the mobile phone – had its own spot under the sun.

Because of their proliferation and greater reach than the internet in most countries, mobile phones have found various innovative uses amongst people. SMS messaging has become an important activation tool to organize petitions and demonstrations. The governments in Cambodia and Iran shut down messaging servers to foil the campaigning attempts of demonstrators. Zimbabwean journalists have been using sms to circulate news after other electronic forms of communication were banned by the government. To complete the video angle came the camera phones - billions of them clicking away and spewing images and video onto the net, making sure that information was never this instant ever.

So the holy trinity has been leading citizen journalism into the future, where greener pastures beckon. ‘Citizen journalism outlets’ like topix.com and BostonNOW have begun mushrooming, the former customizing itself to each town and allowing users to be the editors, and the latter, offering condensed versions of the story in the print edition and the full-length version online.

The trends for the future have already begun to set in. Online networking is changing the concept of socialising. Podcasting is threatening radio in a big way. The other wave that has been looming large over the shores of technology is Web 2.0, a fancy name according to some for a bouquet of interactive applications that let users collaborate and share information online. To be ‘in’ with Web 2.0, you should necessarily be seen at the right places – like Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, Flickr, a photo sharing site, Facebook, a social networking site, Digg, where you can select and prioritize news stories, Squidoo, that lets you put up a page on any topic of your choice, and Zebo, where you can ask for advice on shopping and products, both from friends and experts.

It’s not over yet. Bluedot.us lets users click on a blue dot on screen when they find a page they like or find useful. The page is now stored and can be shared with the rest of the community. Loopt.com causes cellular phones to relay a signal every 15 minutes, thus conveying where exactly the owner is, to anyone who is looking for him/her. Pandora.com helps you match any song with others that are similar in rhythm, lyrics or melody and lets you listen to it for free. Yelp.com lets you review any topic under the sun – people, places, services – so when you search for a place, you not only get the map, but also feedback on the same.

Even as the world is trying to come to terms with Web 2.0, sites like Powerset.com are ushering in the next generation of interactivity – Web 3.0 that ‘thinks’ and searches qualitatively and semantically, rather than just look for words functionally like today’s search engines. Web 3.0 will do what its predecessors couldn’t – understand, be intelligent and do its own homework before it provides an answer.

Lawsuits, copyright fiascos and inflammatory videos be damned - YouTube and its cousins are here to stay. And the big names think so. As the world’s oldest cliché goes, ‘When you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.’ That has been Plan B when legal warfare is proving to be too expensive and futile. Channels like the BBC have decided to use the power of YouTube to their advantage. Now promotional clips of their news and entertainment shows will be available on the site.

Meanwhile, CNN has launched CNN Exchange, a user-created content site that would take on YouTube and OhmyNews. News Corporation, NBC Universal and Comcast Corporation are looking at a network that would offer premium (read pay site) content that would offer video within 15 minutes of live broadcast on television.

The direction that video sharing and citizen journalism is heading in is apparent from the fact that the Person of the Year for 2006 – as selected by TIME magazine – was ‘You’, the general public for its role in generating content and ‘advancing the information age by using the internet’. And TIME’s Invention of the Year for 2006 was YouTube. Above all, when a smart cookie like Google invests 1.65 billion bucks on a bunch of hipsters hosting close to 3000 video clips every hour, you know where the future lies.

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DON'T PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
Here’s a list of famous ‘controversies’ that video-sharing sites like YouTube have found themselves in, in recent times…

July 2006
No blogs please, we’re Indians
The Indian government bans several community sites likes Yahoo Groups, Blogger and Orkut.

October 2006
Bolt from the blue
Universal Music sues Bolt.com and Grouper a possible $150,000 in damages for every copyright infringement made.

January 2007
Sex, lies, but no video tape
Brazilian supermodel Daniella Cicarelli and her boyfriend get YouTube temporarily shut down in Brazil for violating their privacy.

January 2007
Disrespect to the Father
The Government of India takes exception to a clip on YouTube showing a man dressed as Gandhi performing a pole dance.

March 2007
Say no to cricket
The ICC orders YouTube to remove World Cup clips claiming copyright infringement.

March 2007
Can’t thank no one
The Academy objects to YouTube running unauthorized Oscar award video clips.

March 2007
The Aussie boomerang
The state of Victoria in Australia ordered YouTube blocked from 1,600 government schools after a gang of male students used it to circulate their videotaped assault on a 17-year-old girl.

March 2007
Turning cold turkey on clips
Turkey blocks access to YouTube for featuring clips that were seen as insulting to its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

March 2007
Hunting down the hunter
Activist groups sue Viacom for asking YouTube to remove a parody of The Colbert Report.

March 2007
No clips via Viacom
Viacom files a $1 billion copyright infringement suit against YouTube, even after 100,000 clips were pulled off the site.

April 2007
Royalty down the tube
The Thai government blocks access to YouTube because of a video clip that was disrespectful to their King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

(Appeared in the New Indian Express Sunday Supplement as YouToo.com on 29 Aril, 2007)