Week 9: #20 Me Discovering YouTube

I am fairly impressed with YouTube and find some of its content quite exciting.

I discovered it for the first time late one night about 2 months ago when I'd fallen in love with a song in a music video in an Apple Nano player TV commercial. I had the commercial on our digital video recorder [in the middle of a show we'd taped]. I played it a few times trying to make out the lyrics, and then tried turning on the closed-captioning and was then able to read the lyrics.

Still didn't know the artist's name or the song's title, and the simple main lyrics, "1 2 3 4" made me think identifying it was going to be tough. But I then tried the Apple website on my home laptop computer, pulled up the TV commercial and credits, and was able to find the corresponding album on Amazon.com for the song, "1234" by Feist. A reviewer's comments there mentioned the YouTube video, and that was it.

After watching the Feist video I went searching for Neil Diamond, [who I've been a serious fan of for over 30 years]. I was amazed at the rare performances content I found. Many common clips too, but just as many that were unique and unknown to me of Neil in his prime in the 1970's when I first discovered his music. I was astonished to watch so many intense, dramatic performances of songs that were still fairly new at the time, and I stayed up watching till close to 1am.

Today I went searching to find a particular music video of the Mason Williams guitar instramental, "Classical Gas," and found it [more or less]. I'd seen the "music video" during a Smothers Brothers TV episode in the late 1960's, but not since, and it was always one of my favorite pieces of music. I found a recreation of the original video, which is what I've linked to on this blog.

I like what I can find on YouTube, but I wish the clips were of larger size, better resolution, and recordable to DVD [in case they disappear from the web at some point without warning].

I'm not sure what features might be interesting if applied to library websites, since they too would suffer from the limited resolution and screen size. Videos might have to be limited to "talking heads" because of the lack of viewable details?