When YouTube is TheyTube

I have my College RSS pointed to YouTube (thanks Karine!), and I end up watching the first 10 seconds of a lot of student work.

Today this Easy Mac Death Metal piece comes over the feed, produced by a group of students that seem to produce a new video every couple days.

The piece begins with a number of jokes about farting and defecation, and then proceeds to what actually is a pretty amusing interpretation of a Death Metal song as being about someone stealing your Mac & Cheese.

It's nothing I would ever want my institution's stamp on, but my guess is the video will get more hits than anything else Keene State has produced (it's got 22 hits as of this writing, but just watch).

Interesting question -- we all know how to catch the breeze when something we are unabashedly proud of goes viral, and we know how to get a crisis plan ready if something undeniably negative may be floating to the top of YouTube.

But if I know something like this might go viral, does that help me at all? I imagine not. A video that simultaneously says some of our students are enterprising, creative, funny, and overly obsessed with defecatory humor is probably just unusable down to the level of its DNA.

But I'm happy to hear a counter-argument. Could such talent be harnessed for the good of the college? And if so, how?

Wii, Stumbleupon, etc

Had a great time last night pointing my Wii to the new Wii-compatible Stumbleupon Video channel. Saw a ukelele version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and an old recording of that Sesame Street skit where the two monsters improvise jazz ("Bah-da-da-bupp! boo-doop-doo-doo-doo...Oh forget it, either you know it or you don't).

How does this relate to marketing to Millenials? Well, two advantages that traditional TV has had over the internet is that it is

a) A more culturally shared experience, and
b) Semi-ambient and social

And this takes another chunk out of an already dying market.

Is this the same evolution that's been happening all along?

Yep.

What does it mean?

Don't know. But I'm listening to OK Go on Pandora right now, MTV is laying people off, and I spent last night relaxing watching the StumbleUpon Video Music Channel on my Wii while posting at my political blog.

Year of the dynamic playlist, perhaps? Seemed worthy of note...