DACS General Meeting
June, 2010

Meeting Review:
YouTube—Scott Preston

by Joseph Tobin

On June 1st, Scott Preston talked about YouTube, a popular video sharing site. YouTube was originally created by 3 PayPal employees in 2005. In 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google, a popular search engine service. Today, YouTube is used by many people, including the movie industry, music companies, television networks, technology websites, businesses, and ordinary people. YouTube gained its popularity because of it's easy to use interface, large community, and variety of social features.

YouTube allows you to post how-to videos, home videos, and other original content. However there are a few restrictions on what can be posted and will be removed from the site if it doesn’t comply with YouTube’s terms of service. You are not allowed to post television episodes, full or parts of movies, content created by other users, inappropriate content, or anything over 10 minutes. Violating these rules may result in the video being pulled or in some cases, permanent suspension.

YouTube has many of the features of a social network, including friends and Private messaging (PM). YouTube also has a feature called subscriptions. When you subscribe to another user, you are notified on the homepage of any new videos they uploaded. This is a useful feature that allows you to see new videos by the user as soon as they are uploaded, without having to go to the channel.

When you join YouTube, you are given a channel. Your channel is a page of YouTube where information you want to be seen by other users is stored. This may include personal information, videos, favorites, friends, subscribers, and subscriptions. A channel is also where you can subscribe to other users, send friend requests, PM, and block the user. You are given some customization options for your channel, such as background, layout, and color pallet.

Partnership is a feature of YouTube where users can make money from their videos. To become a partner, you need to reach a certain level for the number of subscribers and video views. Partners are generally corporations and popular users. When you become a partner, you are allowed to have videos longer than 10 minutes, and are given more customization options for your channel.

To upload content, you can upload directly from a camera or web cam, or from video editing software. Scott recommends that the name of your video should describe the general idea of the video, and your description should be relatively short. It is also important to choose an appropriate category and add tags that are relative to the video. Tags are used by the search engine to find your video. Videos uploaded can either be public (visible to all users), unlisted (does not appear in search), or private (only specified people can see it).

YouTube has become a part of every day life, being used by every one from corporations to every day users. YouTube has grown a lot since its creation in 2005, and will continue to be a growing source of entertainment, marketing, and information.


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