Man, the places I’d be if I had this childs talents…

Hay Jude! Better, better, better!
Hey, a guy can dream.

Submerge your computer in Mineral Oil.

Why not?

NO ONE LIVES FOREVER!

I’ve always been a sucker for Tim Burton & his whimsical style; it comes out this Christmas :-D.

The boys and I like to look at train videos on YouTube from time to time. Trainspotters the world over have taken hold of YouTube for the distribution of their work and dads with young boys are benefiting hugely.

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. Browsing around YouTube (it’s impossible not to), I saw quite a lot of people posting “responses” to original content videos. This is not a facility provided by YouTube but rather something that seems to be springing up organically from the user community. People are making response videos to whatever they see and posting “Re: Flying Cheese Monster Hits Light Pole” wherein the virtues and failings of the Cheese Monster are discussed.

I watched a few of the responses. They’re all horrible, horrible rubbish, without exception. Anybody who’s made one of these things should be ashamed. This garbage adds nothing of value to my YouTubing and frankly I want that bit of my life back that I wasted watching them. Oh, and I’ll just say that when you’re making a video of yourself, people, look into the camera. The whole watching yourself on the computer screen while you’re filming yourself annoys the snot out of me. But I digress.

My assessment of the worthlessness of this content doesn’t mean that it’s not worth-ish-y. I’m not quite the best when it comes to spotting trends and value on the Internet because I still don’t see the point of MySpace, but it seems to me that this could be the next big thing. What’s more Internet than monotonic emo children preening and complaining about something they just watched on YouTube? Nothing! It’s MySpace redux.

So that’s what this looks to be becoming, a form of video MySpace. YouTube’s next big challenge (and a gauge of how sharp they are or aren’t) will be to provide new and innovative bits of functionality to handle their becoming MechaMySpace, like built in response handling. If they succeed in doing this, they win. Again. If they don’t they could lose out big to the next up and comer that makes socializing in this more bi-directional manner a core part of the product.

What’s up yours?!

Weird Al has a nack for not only parodies, but tapping the vein of our pop culture.