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by Mike Masnick


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Tracing YouTube's Ancestry Back To America's Funniest Home Videos

from the the-web-2.0-family-tree dept

The tech world is pretty fast paced, with people looking forward all the time and rarely looking back. That's unfortunate sometimes as there are things to be learned from what happened in the past. Slate has a fun article tracking the cultural history of home videos from the cultural zeitgeist of America's Funniest Home Videos to YouTube today. It mostly focuses on AFHV and what a cultural phenomenon it was when it first aired, while noting the underlying boundary pushing it encouraged, which is now displayed widely on YouTube. While the article trashes YouTube a bit for being "lonelier, less welcoming, and more pathetically voyeuristic," that's only half of the equation. It's also a lot more powerful for both publishers and viewers (and, in some cases, the distinction gets pretty blurry). Of course, that's representative of just about all of the new online-enabled publishing platforms these days. The signal-to-noise may be lower, but the absolute signal is much, much higher and much, much more compelling.

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  1. where's Saget?

    by JackR - Aug 25th, 2006 @ 12:39am

    Now we just need to find the web 2.0 version of Bob Saget. Or maybe not...

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. where's the Jackalope??

    by w1nX - Aug 25th, 2006 @ 1:41am

    Fast as fast can be... you'll never catch me !! HAHAHAHA!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  3. found'im

    by Tek'a - Aug 25th, 2006 @ 2:51am

    http://youtube.com/watch?v=uDwacpJ_HwM

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  4. Patent

    by Rajesh - Aug 25th, 2006 @ 5:37am

    Its a surprise that American Funny Home Videos isn't patented

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  5. T-shirt?

    by Dudebro - Aug 25th, 2006 @ 7:01am

    Youtube's great but where's my T-shirt and $10,000!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  6. Saget

    by boobtoons - Aug 26th, 2006 @ 1:03pm

    I agree with JackR, Saget should become the official host of YouTube and provide hilarious voiceovers!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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