What can we learn from this?

On YouTube alone on this topic there are some 1,500 videos with a total duration of 25.2 hours. There are videos on almost every topic, however bizarre they may be. Even on topics that aren’t any topic at all, like “we got some food at McDonald’s and film now how we eat burgers.” Who watches that stuff? Hardly anybody. Welcome to the “long tail,” the niches of exponential decline accounting for a large amount of more than 100 million videos on YouTube.

There is a point when those niches become unmarketable. We’ve seen in the video above how larksome kids set their car on fire, or half a forest. Others test flamethrowers in their bedroom or try to light a cigarette with a flamethrower. These are rather silly actions, not mentioning obviously illegal things – alone on the consuming of psychoactive salvia (prohibited in Germany) there are 13,700 videos on YouTube.

Nobody would buy adverts on such a video. However, YouTube is financed by advertising. At the same time it becomes exponentially easier to produce and upload videos with a camera on your mobile: the “long tail” gets longer, thus the costs for hosting and streaming. Well, at the same time those latter factors get cheaper by the hour, but with the commercialization of those platforms the question arises: are those microgenres endangered? And what would we miss if we didn’t have these obscure contents any more?

Microgenres are the primeval soup of the Internet. Here the trends of tomorrow crop up, therefore they are also an economic driving force.

Even if there’s no such things as a community, a subculture of youth with self-made flamethrowers – for example the discussion whether there is a danger of flames flashing back into the container appears over and over again – still those contents create social relationships.

With those single irrelevant snapshots in time our society has the unique opportunity to create a comprehensive archive of everyday life of the 21st century. Just think of the scientific value of these recordings today or in a hundred years! Therefore yes, what we consider trivial today will have considerable historic-documentary or scientific value tomorrow.

And yes, in the hands of a company like Google that is subject to commercial constraints and changes, this content is in danger of getting deleted. Out of the top 100 companies existing a hundred years ago, today still three exist. While commercial, expensively produced content has linear growth, non-commercial content grows exponentially. When there is a point where the marketable part cannot support the other any longer, we are facing the loss of this archive of amateur recordings. Unless Google knows and speculates with that value?

A possible solution might be a new initiative by Wikimedia: let’s get video on Wikipedia. Because even while today 1,500 flamethrower videos are still irrelevant for an article on Wikipedia, they could find a new home at Wikimedia Commons.

1. <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/ v/ VideoID" width="480" height="360">
2. <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/ v/ VideoID" />
3. <param name="quality" value="high" />
4. <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" />
5. <!-- Fallback content -->
6. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/ watch? v=VideoID">
7. <img src="http://img.youtube.com/ vi/ VideoID/0.jpg" width="480" height="360" alt="[Video title]" />
YouTube Video
8. </a>
9. </object>

Please note that there are spaces in the code above to allow linebreaks. If you copy and paste you need to remove those.

Here is an example:

Now there’s light at the end of the tunnel: a few days ago Apple filed a patent for multi-touch in combination with features such as voice commands and speech recognition, facial recognition, gestures, fingerprint input, body temperature, heart rate, skin impedance, and pupil size.

With that range of input possibilities, accessibility on the iPhone (and on other devices) could be significantly improved. Also other visionary devices come into range, like the Charmr for diabetes management.

The Charmr was a great design study by Adaptive Path, although a touch screen is a problem for people with diabetes who are more likely to develop vision impairments and lose tactile sensitivity. Speech recognition is an obvious solution.

So when Chris mentions JavaScript badges for del.icio.us, I think of Ed Eliot’s PhpDelicious or how to get similar results in WordPress. Naturally when he had the splendid idea to add captioning to YouTube videos with Google’s JavaScript API, I asked myself if there wasn’t a better way. There is, but to my surprise neither YouTube nor Yahoo! Video take advantage of that capability:

1. It’s common practice to implement text content in Flash via XML.
2. DFXP is a W3C XML standard for captioning videos.
3. There are free tools like MAGpie for creating captions, and they all support DFXP.
4. If YouTube or Yahoo! Video would allow users to upload and attach a DFXP file to a video, it would become dead easy for anybody to caption it. Not only for the filmmaker, captioning could be crowdsourced!

Just anticipating Joe Clark’s inevitable (and justifiable) objection: of course captioning is not an easy thing that anybody can do, to do it right it requires people with special training. But considering the number of videos on those platforms the only affordable and practical solution to provide any captioning at all is crowdsourcing. That can also be applied to the control of quality, accuracy, or reporting abuse.

Of course this would enhance primarily accessibility, but the XML files would further help search engines to index video content. And their marketing people would love such a feature for the positive PR!

Well, I submitted the suggestion both to Google and Yahoo!, you can vote on the Yahoo! Developer Network for it (Google is more closed-lipped). I’m curious who will be the first to offer that feature …