YouTube Video BLogging: The LG15 Affair

I have, up until now, been blissfully unaware of the YouTube video blogging phenomenon. I knew it existed and have seen an odd vid or two on the site, I just didn't realize how much time the average person was spending just talking to the camera. People are doing this in much the same way as forums are done. All the bizarre interaction is there. Drama, name calling, censored vids, people role playing a character online. I think I stumbledupon one to start the ball rolling this evening. A while later, I was glassy eyed from following the inane trail of the Lonelygirl15 saga. She is a young vblogger with a boyfriend and a strange religion. She's naive and fresh.....well, no, she's an actress and it's all a trumped up multilayered story enacted by this girl and her cohorts. It's entertaining. Even the people complaining are entertaining in a weird church bus wreck on the highway sort of way.

OMG the Zodiac of Denderah! When's the ceremony! Did Daniel really cross the line! OMG monkeyfemme thinks youtube shouldn't have fake people on it, it's for social interaction and learning about people! OMG a freaky guy with huge eyes that talks funny talking about mp3 rips!

People really are putting themselves out there, from the safety of their bedrooms. Brings to mind the movie Pulse (Japanese Title: Kairo).

I can't believe this girl splashed all over the media, including Letterman, while I turned a blind eye to it all. I'm no longer YouTube ignorant. I probably wish I were, but onward and upward!

I almost forgot the drahma and the FREAKY GUY!

The Complete Web 2.0 Directory

Go2Web2.0.net. It's a sortable directory of "those" sites...RSS, Social Media, content aggregation, podcasting, and the like. Regardless of what you think about the marketing slogan known as "Web 2.0", this site is a neat little aggregation of sites with a nice, easy to use format.

Trailfire.com

I stubled upon (stumbleupon ) an interesting, free web tool called Trailfire. It looks pretty interesting. In essence, people create and publish web surfing trails with comments. A user can mark pages to create a condensed surfing session for anyone with similar interests. According to the site...

Trailfire is a hosted service that enables anyone to comment on any web page. Place a 'trail mark' on a page with your comments or notes. A trail mark can contain text, images, videos and other media types. When you give several marks the same 'trail name' you are forming your own navigation path on the web. We call this a 'Trail'.

Trailfire provides a useful "Guided Tour" of it's own page as a trail. A good way to see what it can do. I went for a test run by following a trail entitled "HTML helps" and it was a pretty informative run of sites related to HTML, including some WordPress help, RSS, adding various widgets to web pages, etc. Overall, pretty useful info regarding the stated trail topic. I followed that up with a trail called "Top Hacks everyone should know" which consisted of one lonely web page that I found to be only marginally related to the topic of Top Hacks.

Trailfire currently works with IE and Firefox, has a sidebar and a nice hidable widget for following the trail and reading comments. Additionally, there are subscriptions to other users trails and the ability to add HTML to "marks", which are the indicators that make up a trail and will have comments, etc per the specific page it is marking.

As with many of these new integrated browsing tools, it will get better as it is used. Certainly has intriguing possibilities for research, extension to blog entries, shopping, and sharing.