"Leave Britney alone!"
With Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Jawed Karim co-founded what would become the most important multimedia site on the Web. Technology reporter Omar El Akkad takes a trip through the highs and lows of YouTube.
For a long time, two young British brothers had the most-viewed video on YouTube. The spot was called "Charlie bit my finger - Again!" One of the brothers in the video was named Charlie, and the plot is, well, self-explanatory. However both brothers were recently bitten by fashion-slash-pop sensation Lady Gaga, whose video for the song Bad Romance is now YouTube king, proving that the only thing the Internet loves more than a video of quarrelling British toddlers is a video of something … completely different.
Earlier this year, an Italian court convicted Google executives of violating a child's privacy after somebody uploaded to YouTube a video of an autistic child being bullied. The decision had far-reaching implications; in order to make sure no illegal or offensive videos end up on YouTube, the website would have to vet each individual clip - an almost impossible task with hundreds of millions of videos on the site. The court's decision was perhaps YouTube's most serious brush with the law, but there's no shortage of groups its model has angered - chiefly, record and movie companies. Every day, the site receives a flood of demands for the removal of videos, usually over copyright violations.
In recent years, Google has been going all-out to translate its massive YouTube viewership into something a little more profitable. Ads are popping up on millions of videos, and some companies have signed deals with YouTube to create their own custom pages. For Google, turning YouTube into the web's next ad hub is a no-brainer: companies pay a lot more for an interactive display ad, such as a video clip, than they pay for static text ads that run on Google's traditional search engine.
Recognizing YouTube's potential, government officials from around the planet have established a presence on the site. The Obama administration maintains a significant YouTtube presence, with its own channel on the site. During the H1N1 scare, the Mexican secretary of health set up a channel. The Iraqi government has uploaded a small number of speeches and public service announcements. Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave the service a go, when he answered Canadians' questions on YouTube earlier this year.
More than just about any service, YouTube has managed to blur the lines between celebrity and laughing stock. Millions upon millions of people have now seen, commented on and made parodies of a video of a Canadian high-school kid wildly swinging a pretend light-saber. The video was discovered and uploaded to the web, where it became a viral hit, much to the embarrassment of the student who starred in it. Many an otherwise-unknown have found themselves caught in YouTube's bizarre hybrid of fame and ignobility: from an obese gentlemen singing an unbearably catchy pop tune, to a guy named Tay Zonday singing Chocolate Rain, to a kid who thought it'd be a good idea to plead with the world to leave Britney Spears alone.
Every now and then, you'll get an e-mail from a friend with a title like: "Hey, check out this video of Barack Obama punching a crocodile in the mouth!" You'll click on the link, but what you'll see instead is ex-pop-star Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. This is known as Rickrolling, and is one of the many strange mass-cultural phenomena facilitated by YouTube. Others include videos of Adolf Hitler from the German movie Downfall, in which the fake English subtitles make the dictator sound enraged over trivial nonsense. Not to mention countless clips of a cat providing piano accompaniment to random people making fools of themselves - the great sociological commentary of the YouTube age.