Playout date: 26 November 2006
Duration: 6:15
Views at the time added to HTV: 31,666
Likes at time added: 72
Dislikes ” ” “: 3
Popularity % ” ” ” =L/(L+D): 96.0%
Comments ” ” ” : 1
Total interactions by time added: 76
Camera: Logitech Webcam
Post Production: None
Location: Home
Other people featured: None
Genre: Reply to other vlog
Music used: None
Languages used: Polish
Animals/plants featured: None
Other remarks:
This is a great example of what was going on in the early days of YT. Things like this are barely happening in the YT community today in fact it is hard to speak of there being one past the third year of the existence of the site. One of the things that fell by the wayside as YT got more corporate in the wake of its transfer to Google was that the feature for replying to a video with another video, which the community liked to use, was gone. This video was an example of the use of that reply feature. The feature disappeared but videos YouTubers had made using the featured stayed on in the lists of the person making the video but were no longer linked up to the video they were responding to, and now I doubt you will even find the one I was responding to.
Aeric Winter was one of the prominent YouTubers in the early days, prolific for a while in making videos, and very community minded. He organised a get-together in Berlin and I attended (you’ll see some footage of this in a later video) with my family and met Aeric. At this stage, we only knew each other on line. He liked Poland and had spent a while studying here, and wanted some feedback on his Polish.
Knowing that all real Poles ever do in this situation is compliment you on your language without giving useful feedback, I did what I could to help. An unusual side-effect of this was tht I ended up getting contacted by Polish radio and a few sentences by me after a phone interview appeared on the broadcast for languages day. It remains one of my most-viewed videos, with almost 32,000 views. Aeric’s own channel went into abeyance as he had little time for it once he started his career, and although he had very good stats for the early time, over time this video has outperformed even his originals in terms of views. I hope all is going well with him, he was and am sure still is a really nice bloke.
In response to your account of what happened with YouTube, it amazes me how many heavyweight creators of the most substantive content the Internet has to offer get shuffled around and taken down by the endless changes to our virtual world. It’s darn frustrating trying to browse GeoCities pages, for instance, through the various archival versions that remain. But at least they remain. How many don’t? Astronomy, radios, plants, languages, handcrafts, mathematics—all these and more have suffered deletions and untraceable relocations. Never mention the impossibility of forming anything actually resembling a community, albeit virtual, in these conditions.
I thank you for maintaining a long-running archive of substantive and also humorous content and leaving it all there permanently. And then to make serious efforts at indexing it all? More than one could have asked. I became an adult after the term Web 2.0 had been coined, so I’m pretty much automatically late to the party for any of the Internet communities to which I referred in the above paragraph, but there are still those of us who still read books and still use the Internet as a qualitative and quantitative extension of books. Perhaps we can’t go back—at least not overnight—to the level of intellectual endeavors before we came to depend on the written word as our storage, retrieval, and processing medium; that doesn’t mean that we need accelerate the move away from depth in analytical and cognitive processing that is being provoked by contemporary paradigms and practices in digital media.
I’m pleasantly surprised that anyone appreciates it! Many thanks.