9 YouTube videos that changed my perspective on the world and the lessons I learned

Above, TED co-founder Chris Anderson talks about the impact of Youtube and other online video has on the world.

Youtube was a powerful part of moving forward content dissemination on the web. Suddenly there was a free place to host, distribute and embed easily video that drove traffic and audience.

About which time Youtube was overwhelmed with kitten videos, personal photos looped under copyrighted music and clips of everything in between.

But, through all the muck, there is brilliance. That much I’ve found since I first clicked on a Youtube link in an email in my college sophomore year apartment and shared with my roommate. Universities are beginning to share lectures online, and more teachers, lessons and ideas are spreading on Youtube. (Perhaps not as much as kitten videos)

To prove there is more than the nonsense, below, I share the 10 videos that have made the biggest impact on me and the lessons I took from them.

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The state of social networking: what site is the best, the worst, a waste

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I’ve written about social media here more than I’d probably like to admit.

These social networking sites are transforming the way we receive our news and information. There’s no secret there.

But they keep popping up, so much so that I’ve stopped joining them, because I never know when enough’s enough.

Newspapers are still figuring out the power of the conversation, and some say that media in general is covering social media more than they are using them. It just seems no one seems interested in deciding what is worth anyone’s time.

The real lesson is that social networking and other media are tools, plainly and simply. Not all are good for everyone.

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Youtube: my one-year anniversary emits thoughts as a device

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I was fairly late in joining Youtube – one year ago today, the day after I launched this Web site.

My roommate first told me about the video sharing and hosting site in November 2005, a year after it launched and a year before Google purchased it. However, I didn’t even think to join it until last December, when I put this site up and realized it was decidedly 1999-like without any multimedia.

Video was a first go. One year later, I have some thoughts on Youtube’s use as a social networking tool, how it moves forward and what it will mean in the future.

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Your best friend (online): how many social networking relationships make love?

You’re a member of a dozen or more social networking sites. Same goes for someone you’ve never met but know online, professionally or otherwise. When does that online relationship get weird?

I’ve never met Greg Linch.

He’s the editor at large for online and multimedia at The Miami Hurricane, the student newspaper pf the University of Miami. On my side of things, I’m fresh out of the setting of another large, celebrated college newspaper with a recent flurry of multimedia interest: The Temple News, of Temple University in big, beautiful Philadelphia.

So, in the small circles of young, Web interested journalists, Linch and I have professionally crossed paths. Things went and got serious when we started following each other on Twitter.

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