Yahoo and Time’s Top 10 Viral Videos – Now Can We Kill the Term Viral?

I am hard-pressed to think of a more overused, misrepresented and misunderstood concept than “viral vidoes.”

A quick look at either Yahoo’s or Time’s 2008 “Top 10″ lists makes it pretty clear that there is no real definition of what makes a video viral other than it was seen on the internet, that it was relatively short and that it was seen by a lot of people.

In fact, Yahoo lists the now-famous Shiba Inu Puppy Cam as a “viral video” even though it was a live-streaming event, not a standalone video at all.

In addition, it doesn’t seem to matter who made the video or even whether it was made for the internet originally or not. That’s how clips of Sarah Palin being humiliated by Katie Couric somehow become on par with Joss Whedon’s elaborate internet series “Doctor Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog.”

We all know that this is the time of year for lists, and that we all love lists, but it would be nice to see everyone drop that “viral video” tag and just list your ten favorites.  That’s what it looks like you’re doing anyhow.  Now just admit it.

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YouTube Turns 3

Wired points out that YouTube made it’s appearance on the scene only three short years ago.  Amazing to think it has been such a brief period of time:

“The video-sharing site, founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, has, in three short years, become the third-most-visited website worldwide, trailing only Yahoo and YouTube’s parent company, Google.

With its slogan — “Broadcast yourself” — sounding a clarion call to exhibitionists the world over, YouTube was an instant hit, encouraging individuals to submit not only their personal videos but movie and TV clips, and music videos as well.”

Of course, YouTube has become much more than anyone ever imagined.  TechCrunch has a nice look at what’s ahead for the internet titan, including:

“YouTube wants to be everywhere. It will continue to distribute its videos beyond the Web browser to mobile devices and large, flat-screen TVs in the living room.”

Yahoo Tries to Block Pirate Bay

TechCrunch has a look at the attempts of Yahoo to block folks who are searching for the infamous bittorent site, PirateBay.

When I tried to search for it myself I received NO direct links to the site on Yahoo.

However, when I did the same search on Google, the Pirate Bay was the top hit.

Not sure what Yahoo is hoping to accomplish from this effort aside from confirming that they are not really competing with Google in terms of comprehensive search.  It is certainly not illegal to search for the site, nor is it illegal for Yahoo to provide the link.

This is a very scary prelude to what might come as more sites we consider trustworthy turn out to be making a lot of censoring decisions without your input.

Yahoo Video…why?

Yahoo has relaunched their video site, Yahoo Video, with a combination of UGC and “exclusive” content that looks to be repurposed film and tv stuff.

Not sure what Yahoo hopes to achieve by this, um, move.  It feels like YouTube has this world well in hand and unless Yahoo is planning to offer some sort of added benefits (promotion, revshare, editing, quality) I’m not sure why anyone would pay much attention to the site.

We’ll have to track the viewer numbers and see what kind of traffic it generates.

(via Mashable)