I’m finally getting some of my work up on YouTube. At first it seemed redundant, since I have many of these videos on my website already. Then I thought – well, YouTube has an audience that is certainly much larger and quite different than the group of people that already visits my site.
I think the traffic to my site is not too shabby, but of course the stats don’t offer me a clear enough picture of what people are looking at and what they find to be useful information about me. I can divine some things from the statistics (such as which might be the favourite blog posts or projects for people to view) but it is a bit harder to piece together a narrative of each person’s visit, at a glance.
So the decision to upload things to YouTube was generated by a desire to offer my tidbits of video to a larger and more diverse group, but also because there is a pattern of use at YouTube that I know I can feed into.
Streamlining and harmonizing the interfaces people need to use to get to you makes good sense. YouTube offers a way for its users to search, navigate and mark favourites that each user knows how to do instinctively after the first few times. As Steven Johnson says in his book Interface Culture: “…knowledge becomes second nature to most users because it has a strong spatial component to it…” And so it becomes easier for people to find my videos on YouTube, because they don’t have to learn the user interface of my own website, http://michelle.kasprzak.ca – they know the UI of YouTube already and just have to enter the right search term, or complete a serendipitous series of clicks through related clips or users.
So perhaps more and different mouse pointers will be easily sliding along, clicking on the hyperlink that conjures up my content. That’s terrific – though it brings up the whole other dilemma of the smart use of Web 2.0 tools. YouTube is a clear winner, but others? I’m not sure about posting my versions of popular songs on the karaoke 2.0 site SingShot just yet.