Tuesday 18 May 2010

Are you on YouTube?

YouTube turned five years old last month.

The first video was uploaded on April 23rd 2005, but it wasn't until November that the site was officially launched. Just over a year later, 28-year-olds Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, sold YouTube for $1.65 billion to Google. Bastards.

It's hard to imagine the internet without video and readily accessible footage that anyone can create, upload and share.
CairnsBlog was active in video blogging (or vlogging, as it's called) during the Cairns Council election campaign in 2008, and in February of that year I launched a YouTube channel dedicated to covering local environmental and political events. Veteran local environmental activist Terry Spackman has helped me film and expose many development breaches and shared them with CairnsBlog readers.

Over the election campaign I captured mayoral debates and community meetings in a raw unedited, and sometimes dodgy camera work. This inspired the Cairns Post momentarily to record a handful of video interviews, that appeared on their website. Video is now an integral part of social media blogging and CairnsBlog is proud to bring you interviews that you won't see anywhere else.

Today YouTube has launched a commemorative channel full of memorable moments and stories from the first five years. Here's an interview with two of the founders.



The numbers are stunning. In 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000. A year after the site was opened in 2006, 65,000 videos were uploaded every day. 100 million videos are viewed daily with around 20 million visitors every month. Today, 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute. And in May 2010, 2 billion views a day.
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2 comments:

Colin Riddell said...

I AM ON YOUTUBE, HEY JIMMY AND PETER GARRETT.

Paul Taylor, Maryborough said...

I think Youtube has added a great dynamic to not only the enjoyment of surfing the net, but also to blogs like this one.

keep up the good work