A Beginner's Guide to YouTube, Flickr and MySpace

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome, I am Emma I am an enthusiast of YouTube, Flickr, Myspace, rather than an expert. If you’ve any questions about anything at any point, please pipe up – I’ll try my best to answer them. If I can’t answer them I promise to find out the answer and email you about it. I am going to talk about how to use these three sites work and how we can use them in the world of libraries. Has anyone here used any of these sites, or any social network before? Okay, well I am going to start at the start, at the very beginning, so apologies if I am covering something you already know, but this way we’ll all be up to speed eventually. Each site has a lot of features and bangs and whistles – today I will just talk about the basics you need to get started. These sites have a few things in common which you’ll also find in a lot of other social networks. Once you get your head around these things, you’ve got social networking sorted: you’ll see them time and time again in sites like facebook, twitter and the rest. Hopefully what you learn here today will help you get an understanding of how other social networks work too and let you wind you way into the world of youtube, flickr, myspace and beyond into facebook and twitter and all the others.
• #3: They are simply websites – for all the fuss about social networks, that is really all they are when you boil them down. 2. Users are linked together into a network 3. By you guys 4. You don’t have to sign up to use them, but the more you put into these sites, the more you will get out.
• #4: I worked, one tragic summer, as a journalist. I learnt two things one – i’m no journalist and two – journalists get to the centre of the story they are covering by asking these questions
• #5: Easy. If all else fails, use google!
• #6: The clips could be from TV, from films, from videos, they could be animation, music videos, adverts, anything. Tagging is one of those things I mentioned which is common to many, many social networks and it always means the same thing: tagging is assigning keywords or phrases to images or film clips to make them searchable by other users. So if you had a football clip with a Wayne Rooney goal, you might tag it with Rooney, football, goal, soccer – anyone searching with these words will be able to find your clip. And it will link your Rooney goal clip to Rooney goal clips that other people have uploaded and tagged using the same words. No need to sign up – go home and play with youtube at once.
• #7: In its most basic form – you tube is a social network and is TV on the internet – excpt that you decide what to watch and when you want to watch it.
• #8: Lots of people! To give you an idea of the scope of the site ...
• #9: Most Youtube is for fun, but there are uses beyond this, especially for libraries. It is a cheap easy and fast way of getting info across to a potantially massive global audience. We know that different people learn in different ways – some people like a written list of instructions to follow, some like a visual prompt, some people learn by being shown. So ARU could make short clips, perhaps asking the film department to help, to show users how to log in, or use the self-service machines, or even how to search for a book on the catalogue. The scope for using this is huge!
• #10: Go to youtube online Home page – search box, layout Set up an account and build up a profile. A profile is another one of those things that crops up in all the social networks. Your profile is your own little part of the youtube that you control and which displays information about yourself alongside info about what you do on youtube – if you upload a clip, then that clip will be on your profile. If you make a comment on someone elses clip, their clip and your comment will also appear on the profile page. More on this later... Let’s watch a youtube clip – librarian lays down the law Each clip has a page like this: comments. Again, common to all social network sites: people who have seen your clip can leave a comment, or give it the thumbs up. You can also ‘favourite’ a clip, which saves it to your profile. I’ve set up a youtube profile for this conference...
• #14: Dramatic Chipmunk – viral clip. Meaning that people who saw it, sent it to their friends, who sent it to their friends. It had gone viral – eventually this little clip had had over 120 million views! Companies are wising up to this, they can get a lot of exposure for their product by putting wacky clips on youtube, and then hoping that they go viral – Cadburys Gorilla/Phil collins Remember I said about teaching people through youtube? Here’s a vid with the Library of congress classification system explained so users can find books. All these clips can be found on the ARU library channel on youtube, and all these slides you can find on the conference blog. The Books Hooks scheme is where they get kids to send in their questions to librarians via the library website – the library then answers. So, a kid wrote in saying I’ve finished Harry Potter, what can I read next. The YouTube clip is of a really brilliant and enthusiastic and engaging librarian talking about similar books they have in the library. IT’s a good way of reaching out to your users, getting them to engage with the library in a new, informative way, beyond just dropping books off and taking books out. Very impressed. Here’s an advert for a library in New Jersey – really
• #15: Groups – joining groups is a big part of sites like Facebook as well as Flickr. You can find likeminded people, join them and pool your photos, comment on other people’s.
• #17: As with Youtube, a huge amount of people use Flickr.
• #18: Edit – crop them, enlarge them, shrink them, correct red eyes Share – easier than emailling when the file size is too big Store – back up your photos, set them to private, and even if you computer breaks you’ll still be able to get your photos because they are on an external website. Tag them – as with YouTube, you can tag your pictures of say a library so that they are grouped together with other library pictures, and so people can search for them. Again, you can comment on peoples photos or they can comment on yours
• #19: Go to flickr.com Homepage Upload a photo before your very eyes!
• #21: Edinburgh flickr photos Some groups Libraries – tagged photo of library Yes, yes, even Chelmsford...
• #22: Your own page/profile – hence MySpace, cos it is an easy way of building a website. Each page on myspace is setup and run by its user. Pages are connected together into a network by being Friends – another thing that is used in most social networks. It is how pages are linked together. If you find someone whose page you want to be linked to yours, you ask them to be your friend. Then you get updates on their MySpace activity – say if they add more photos or do a blog entry. Unique to myspace is the huge amount of control users have over how their page looks: colours, fonts, images, music. You can also upload photos, music, videos, comments & groups. You also have status updates which is like a one line mini-blog entry to descibe what you are doing, or how you are feeling or anything. Your status update will be seen by other users who are your friends, and you can see their status updates. The most important thing about myspace is music... Its the only site where you can upload music for your site, and for that reason it is mostly used by bands...
• #25: IF you are friends with Neil Young, for example, and wanted to find out what music is inspired by Neil Young, you could look at who Neil Young’s friends are on MySpace. Promoting yourself. Possible to release and promote a record and get really famous without a record company – Lilly Allen. She uses her blog on MySpace especially to really really connect with her fans, on a really personal level, and she is famous now thorugh word of mouth, etc.
• #26: Myspace search box, is pretty rubbish – click to next slide. Best just to google what you want with the word myspace
• #27: Click to ARU myspace...
• #32: Copyright and IP or Intellectual property issues – obviously taking film clips from films and putting it on youtube is illegal according to copyright laws, since you don’t have permission from the owner of the copyright to put it online. Also, even watching unauthorised clips like this is illegal if you go by the letter of the law. Copyright laws can’t really deal with how fast stuff is put up on youtube or myspace. But then companies get huge amounts of exposure from youtube – movie trailers are now released on youtube, companies purposefully make their videos so that they look like youtube clips - Cadburys sold a huge amount of chocolate from their drumming gorilla. So it’s sort of give and take – they seem to be getting happier to let copyright slip as long as they get exposure for their products in this way. Money – youtube, despite having millions of users and visitors everyday, barely makes any money. Example: the SuBo clip. Even though she was singing a song that was owned under copyright to the songwriter, on a TV show owned and hosted by Simon Cowell, which was shown on a commercial TV channel – none of these people made any money. Yet the clip went viral and was seen millions of times. This is perhaps why YouTube was bought by Google for so much money – to impart some control over it. Inappropriate content, cyberbullying – if someone puts somehting offensive or 18 certificate on YouTube, it gets flagged up by users and youtube either takes it down completely or makes it so that you have to get a youtube account before you can see it. But to get an account you just need to tick a box to say you are over 18, and no one checks. And this system relies on users flagging stuff up that is controversial, so it is not an ideal system. Youtube has been banned in a lot of schools for this reason, and because of cultural differences in what is deemed offensive and taken down, Pakistan has banned youtube entirely due to content about the prophet mohammed (which youtube did not deem offensive enough to take off the site.) Likewise, facebook recently refused to put into place a system for reporting cyberbullying on the site – their reasoning was, i think, that they take no responsiblity for what is put on the site, their job is only to host and run the site not police the content. If they had put in a panic button, they would have been accepting some responsibility for stopping it, and they didn’t want this. But who is responsible for what, who is responsible for preventing misuse of the sites, through breaking copyright, removing offensive images or cyber-bullying, is a big issue – especially as the sites have become more popular. It still remains a grey area. As with librarians and wikipedia, some feel that these sites deprofessionalise traditional media like journalism or photography – what’s the point of reading a newspaper when you can read a blog, whats the point of professional photographers when anyone can get professional standard photos and display them with Flickr? Are these sites really deprofessionalising? Or is it a good thing that anyone can, say, release an album through MySpace without a record contract or record company? You can decide on that one.
• #34: Learn something new – get a guitar, learn to play it using youtube tutorials, record your album and set up a band myspace page Or set up a Flickr page to show off your amazing cookery or knitting skills Or you could make a TV programme about something you’ve always wanted to see a TV show about, but that no one has bothered to make yet? If you’ve ever said, someone should really make .... Well, now’s your chance, you’re someone, these sites give you the tools to do it. So don’t be put off by these very big issues surrounding these 3 sites, they are important, fun and interesting sites to visit, so go home and play around with them!!