Wednesday, September 17, 2008

YouTube

This was a fun exercise. I found 2 videos which were of particular interest to me. One I sort of knew was likely to be on YouTube, which was an excerpt from the Auckland Symphony Orchestra's Last night of the Proms concert in June, featuring accordionist Tracey Collins. I belong to this orchestra and there had been talk at rehearsal about this video clip. The other one was the New Zealand Friendly Orchestra which had its debut performance at St Matthews in the city last month. This orchestra is mostly made up of professional musicians (many from the Auckland Philharmonia) who are playing instruments other than their main one, the criteria being that you've had less than 2 lessons or haven't picked it up for many years (tuba players on violin, cellists playing viola, violists on flute and trumpet etc). The results were hilarious - I went to the concert and laughed my head off.

The site seems quite user friendly and works in similar ways to other Web 2.0 applications, in the way that you can tag things and share them with others, add comments etc. I have often been sent links to things on YouTube by friends but never really had a look at the site myself so it was interesting to have a play and see what it all looked like. Like some of the other Web 2.0 things we've looked at like Delicious and LibraryThing, libraries can get on board with YouTube and promote themselves (witness a couple of clips done by Birkenhead Library) and become part of the online community.

1 comment:

Zipperty-doo-dah said...

I love the sound of the New Zealand friendly orchestra! Quite entertaining....