the digital haze.

Image via CrunchBase

youtube is a central part of many of our lives, sad as that may be. it's incredibly easy to squander away hours looking at ridiculous videos of dogs singing and hamsters on pianos, and we rely heavily (though certainly not legally) on it for episodes of our favorite tv shows.

youtube has taken off rapidly; it started in 2005, with the first uploaded video being "me at the zoo" uploaded by the site's founder, jawed karim.



the site has created these online celebrities and the phenomenon of "viral videos" because they spread like a virus. but with success comes competition, and this has come primarily in the form of hulu.

hulu is a commercially-supported video hosting site that posts videos from networks like nbc and fox. the advantage to hulu is that the videos are of much higher quality and can be expanded without losing an picture quality. the major downside is the lack of options as far as which shows are provided.

i don't think that hulu will really pose any serious threat to youtube. youtube will always be the epitome of stupid video humor (with collegehumor coming in second), and it will always feature copyrighted shows it's not supposed to, because it's so difficult to monitor what gets uploaded.

in short, the end of youtube is not near. but it will be interesting to see where it will go from this point.

i can't believe i haven't posted about this before, but i wanted to discuss something VERY near and dear to my heart:

threadless.

threadless is...amazing. basically, it's a t-shirt printing company (skinnycorp) that prints designs submitted by users based on the ratings they receive from the "threadless community" of registered users.

absolutely anyone can submit as long as the design is original. there are guidelines about what can be submitted like number of colors, certain messages, etc, but generally it's a pretty open forum.

and the designs aren't necessarily submitted as absolute finals, either. many users submit potential designs, get feedback, edit the design, and re-submit it to be voted on again.

this is a great example of collaboration between users in an online community to create a product that benefits all. the user gets the fame of having their design printed (as well as $2000 and a $500 gift certificate to the store), the company makes a profit, and the site's users get t-shirts that they voted on and like. it's a simple concept, just stepped up to make it as easy as possible.

i don't see the success of threadless stopping anytime soon. while the shirts range from around $15-25 at full price, they still sell like hotcakes. (and sometimes you can get ahold of them for $5-10 during clearance sales.) i've been known to browse designs for hours, and the 15-20 shirts currently hanging in my closet are proof that i just can't get enough of those witty, whimsical, sometimes ridiculous designs.

collaboration, folks! gotta love it.