Videocracy, Algorithmic Searching, and Phil

After scanning Juhasz' articles (I'm assuming I looked at the right one at IJLM), I became interested in how people examine massive video archives like Youtube. Juhasz claims that "The world’s largest archive of moving images is, and will stay, a mess. A searching eye creates the greatest revenue." While this is certainly true when you approach youtube using its own, itinerant search engine, other websites have created alternative approaches to how we scan through such a massive archive. One of the websites I frequent, avclub.com, runs a daily feature called "Videocracy" (avclub.com/videocracy). Videocracy apparently (though they don't make this super clear) uses an algorithmic search engine to plow through youtube, stupidvideos.com, and other video archives to find "the most-talked-about online video content" each day. You can generally break down the popular videos (those that hold onto a spot on the site for sometimes weeks on end) into a few categories: Vlogs (Phil, Fred, KevJumba, etc.), funny videos (cute cats, car crashes, etc.), political videos (clips from Fox News, Olberman, the occasional 911 truther), ads (both viral and classic), and the occasional obscure foreign clip. Though I can't make any claims about how the algorithm itself functions, it is interesting to note that consistently (in my experience) the most populace videos are not the corporately produced (ads and politics), but in fact the insufferable vlogs. Though I agree with Juhasz about the reification of the boundary between amateur and professional, in an odd way it appears that the amateur is winning.

I am a bit concerned that Juhasz disregards the massive popularity of the vlog by declaring it humor, and therefore "a joke, a place for jokes, a place for regular people whose role and interests must also be a joke." Humor has consistently proven a startlingly effective revolutionary tool in both previous media forms as well as the internet. Take, for example, ObamaGirl. Though there are arguments to be made that Oprah was the first endorsement that pulled Obama into the race against Hillary Clinton, but in my memory I remember the arrival of ObamaGirl as a harbinger for this successful campaign. I doubt the folks at barelypolitical.com planned to make a major change in the dynamics of the upcoming election, but said video received massive public attention, which subsequently popularized the future president.

Of course, most comedic videos on youtube fail to live up to such dynamic hopes. Just to punish you folks, I'm going to link a bunch of Phil, Fred, and KevJumba videos. I'm warning you, this is going to hurt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwVW4A7kZ5c

That last one is my girlfriend's brother. Actually, he's an excellent musician, so check out his other videos. Plug plug plug.