youtube teaches me...

shameless self promotion

i am now guilty of this cardinal sin. what i could never do in real life i am doing on youtube. it's crazy how an experiment that was supposed to help me understand kids becomes more and more a study in my own motivations and behaviors.

late yesterday afternoon, "soundlyawake", aka Nick, tweeted me (yes, i have opened a twitter account. it is part of the phenomenon). i had submitted a question for his comedic "ask keisha" video, but it was very unclear that i was asking the character keisha. so it was not surprising that nick was confused and perhaps a bit perturbed when i asked, "how do you get rid of unwanted body hair?" i explained my mistake, in 140 characters or less, and apologized. he was kind enough to reply and let me know that it was just fine. i boldly replied back explaining that i love his work (which is true) and that i had put him in a video. i sent the link. apparently he watched and liked it and tweeted about it.

now i want to do some research on twitter, but i'd need a lot of cooperation from youtubers. see, compared to dan brown (with over 20,000 followers on twitter), nick's tweet (2500 followers) got me about 45 hits on vidcon in a 10 hour period compared to 800 hits on noodly appendage in about 4 hours. interesting.

so today, i took a chance and sent the link to natalie tran. maybe i'll send it to michael buckley as well.

ok. full disclosure. when i first put vidcon blues up on youtube, i sent it via yt email to all the people in it. only way responded. which means that nick didn't read that email. tweeting is a better way to communicate now? i did see a piece on yt (about texting) that indicated that email is "too slow and cumbersome". so these days it's all about tweets and texts.

truly, this experiment is turning into a full-time job. but it's so compelling, i can't seem to stop. so, do i have any right to turn up my nose at people on youtube who are tweeting every 2 hours about their latest video, or encouraging me to buy this limited time offer t-shirt or coffee mug?

it seems like youtube started as a means of expressing ourselves and is now a means of selling ourselves.