YouTube

YouTube is both a resource and the world's biggest time waster, not only in the time it takes to view the postings, but the time that people spend filming their pets snoring or their babies drooling, and then posting them to YouTube.

There is a lot of valuable content that will become more valuable as time goes on. We can now see presidential speeches and academy award presentations. The grandparents of the drooling babies are certainly delighted to be able to watch whenever they want.

A drawback to the site is that you can't really tell what's genuine and what's a parody. I watched a video of what was supposed to be a Fox newscast of a sane-looking man going on about Bill Clinton and UFOs. Either it was a parody, or Fox News should have their license revoked for airing such inanities -- but I can't really tell you which.

You can put any two unrelated words into the search engine, and get multiple hits, testifying to the unbelievable quantity of material posted. A sterling example was a video of people who were trying to whitewater raft on blow-up anatomically-correct dolls, and another of students trying an experiment by bouncing a basketball off a high place with an egg atop it (the result of the search terms "library" and "egg.")

If I were an anthropoligist in the year 3007 and I dug up YouTube, I would conclude that people in 2007 were unapologetic exhibitionists. Like bloggers :-)