YouTube for [Fill in the Blank]
A whole lot of people like to write about the application of a popular “Web 2.0″ site’s model to a specialized interest, purpose, or population.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone else.
- I’ve written (approximately) a bajillion posts about sites which seek to be “Digg for medical literature.”
- I wrote a post called “Facebook for Scientists“
- I even wrote posts with titles like NurseLinkUp: MySpace for Nurses and Sermo: Another “MySpace for Physicians”.
But I’m going to go a little off-topic because I want to point out a handful of the huge number of sites seeking to be YouTube for [Fill in the Blank].
Before we go completely off-topic, we’ll make a brief stop at SciVee.com, a site frequently described as “YouTube for Scientists.”
Of course, SciVee isn’t the only service seeking to apply the YouTube model to the needs of scientists- there’s also (the previously mentioned) Bioscreencast.com and SciTalks.
But that’s just scratching the surface of sites borrowing YouTube’s model!
There are two YouTube clones for Jews: JewTube and Yideoz.
Of course, Judaism isn’t the only religion with its own YouTube. F’rinstance, there’s IslamicTube (formerly IslamTube).
Not to be outdone by Jews and Muslims, Christian online video enthusiasts have their choice between GodTube and JesusClips.
Lest we be overwhelmed with Piety 2.0, remember that no technology exists which can’t be tasked to serve pornography. Witness if you will the example of PornoTube (I’ll refrain from linking to this obviously NSFW site). There are at least a couple of other sites like PornoTube.
A nice contrast to PornoTube is TeacherTube.
And look at the logos- they’re so stereotypically “2.0″ with their sans serif fonts, horizontal reflections and grey subtitles.
But I don’t have a problem with any of these. I think that a lot of libraryfolk spend a lot of time thinking over services like YouTube and wondering how their ideas might be leveraged to serve the needs of libraries, library patrons, and librarians. Tools like Pligg let anyone make a Digg clone, so I’m betting we’ll eventually see an open-source package for making YouTube clones- any bets on how long it’ll be before there is a YouTube clone intended for librar* purposes? Quick! Register the most intuitive and sensible domain names!
But before you do, ask yourself: does the world need another YouTube clone?
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October 24th, 2007 at 4:18 am
I think there’s a lot to be gained from sites that ‘home in’ on a particular data set, especially if the content is carefully selected. The weakness of search engines such as Google and You Tube is that they will always return a whole load of junk that you don’t want to see along with the few records you do – hence why Google now enables you to create your own search engine from just the sites that you are interested in – the downside of course is that it takes a lot of time to build up a directory of useful content, and to keep it up to date – and if you don’t promote it heavily no-one will know about it or use it. It’s partly what we have done with MedWorm and LibWorm – taken a subset of data rather than try to present everything. The functionality of any online search engine type application will always be just half of the equation – the other half is or course the data. Getting the data you want, and not a lot of junk in addition, is I think a major advantage of any such site, and I think this is the way the web will grow – people will be turning less and less to the big ‘cover everything’ type of engines and more to the specialised carefully constructed data sets, that may offer the same or very similar functionality, just they will contain only the data that you are really interested in. And of course bringing people together that are interested in the same type of data paves the way to build a social network on top. (Now before anyone thinks about reinventing the wheel and building a MedWorm clone, you may like to contact me first – as indeed David did – since it could lead to a fruitful partnership)
November 23rd, 2007 at 1:02 pm
[...] About a month ago, I wrote: …Tools like Pligg let anyone make a Digg clone, so I’m betting we’ll eventually see an open-source package for making YouTube clones… [...]