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I've been sick with an annoying viral cold/flu/thing and so I spent the cold rainy weekend indoors at home, watching videos on YouTube. Let me tell you, you see amazing things in a few hours on youtube. There are are things you might not have expected to exist, like ten minutes dedicated to flat-spotted train wheels. Not a ten minute documentary on how flatspotted wheels get repaired, but a ten minute artistic celebration of that thing that every train has one of, the flatspotted wheel (thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump)
"Fail" is a major YouTube theme. Crashes, wrecks, falls, impacts. Engines blowing up in tractor pulls in such a way that afterwards you can look in through the new big hole in the side of the hood and see the crankshaft lying there, basically just where it normally is except with all the ... engine ... that normally hides it from view having been blown off.
There actually are some videos dedicated to success. Amazing stunts that worked perfectly. These are sort of hard to watch if you've see a lot of "fail." I kept expecting the head injury or the crotch impact instead of the perfectly-executed trick.
I've said before that the "Suggestions" column is just a wonder of algorithmic serendipity. Some of those suggestions make perfect sense (more train videos to go with the flatspot one!) other times...it's hard to say what's at work. I assume anything with a few million views will end up there sooner rather than later.
And on that note, I think we can see confirmation of something we could probably guess. I know that I don't really know who is watching what, and I recognize that gender is actually a very complex thing, but, overall, I think it's fair enough to say that it's men who will click, by the millions, on anything that vaguely promises boobies, and delivers about five seconds of boobies about three minutes into it. There seem to be a lot of those, and they all have millions of views, and anything with millions of views will come up with a high rank in any listing the algorithms do, because there they always are, mixed in with the locomotive engines or the skateboarding crashes.
Tom Murphy wrote in his blog "Do The Math" about phantom loads, the power wasted in devices that are basically turned off but still drawing a few watts of electricity:
"Fail" is a major YouTube theme. Crashes, wrecks, falls, impacts. Engines blowing up in tractor pulls in such a way that afterwards you can look in through the new big hole in the side of the hood and see the crankshaft lying there, basically just where it normally is except with all the ... engine ... that normally hides it from view having been blown off.
There actually are some videos dedicated to success. Amazing stunts that worked perfectly. These are sort of hard to watch if you've see a lot of "fail." I kept expecting the head injury or the crotch impact instead of the perfectly-executed trick.
I've said before that the "Suggestions" column is just a wonder of algorithmic serendipity. Some of those suggestions make perfect sense (more train videos to go with the flatspot one!) other times...it's hard to say what's at work. I assume anything with a few million views will end up there sooner rather than later.
And on that note, I think we can see confirmation of something we could probably guess. I know that I don't really know who is watching what, and I recognize that gender is actually a very complex thing, but, overall, I think it's fair enough to say that it's men who will click, by the millions, on anything that vaguely promises boobies, and delivers about five seconds of boobies about three minutes into it. There seem to be a lot of those, and they all have millions of views, and anything with millions of views will come up with a high rank in any listing the algorithms do, because there they always are, mixed in with the locomotive engines or the skateboarding crashes.
Tom Murphy wrote in his blog "Do The Math" about phantom loads, the power wasted in devices that are basically turned off but still drawing a few watts of electricity:
Imagine that we assign specific tasks to power plants. We have the power plants assigned to lighting applications. There are a goodly number of power plants assigned to running televisions. We’ve got the hair dryer power plants—fewer now than in the big-hair era of the 1980′s. A worker at any one of these plants may feel proud to provide essential services to fellow citizens. Then you’ve got your dozen standby power plants. Imagine the morale at one of those plants: Wally working hard all day, coming home exhausted. But because of poor Wally, our printer could sit doing absolutely nothing and slurping power all day.The idea makes me think of the YouTube comments database. Unlike power plants, it's actually plausible that a team could be dedicated exclusively to the task of keeping the comments database running. Can you imagine what that would be like? Working hard all day for that? And what is it about YouTube that brings that out in people to such an amazing level? We're all sadly used to comments on web sites tending toward the low-value end of the scale in the absence of careful moderation, but, wow, YouTube is just an amazing collection of low-value comments, to say the very least.
