CHECK IT OUT

Today's Mack Attack will be used to introduce readers of this blog to a fantastic new website which I have run across.

www.Youtube.com

It is the Napster/Google of videos.
All kinds of videos, including rare musical recordings and performances, whacked-out epic opi (plural for opus) of every imaginable sub-genre and so much more. Just type in the name of the band or musician or whatever it is you want to see, and chances are it will not only be there, but you'll get lost in all the great distractive choices along the way.
Only catch is that nothing can be downloaded, only uploaded, shared and enjoyed on your computer screen. But man, what an addictively delicious smorgasbord.
I enjoyed seeing Bon Scott leading AC/DC through an early rendition of 'Sin City,' The Kinks doing a 1966 video of 'Sunny Afternoon,' a rousing patriotic heavy metal job called 'Enemy', a plethora of The Gorillaz, Pink Floyd, The Doors, Norah Jones, and so much more. I highly recommend it, unless of course, you have anything at all to do...Because once you go there, you will stay awhile and only be limited by your own repetoire of what you want to see.

About YouTube

Founded in February 2005, by early commerce pioneers of PayPal, YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. Prior to YouTube, there was no easy way for individuals to share video on the Web. Dealing with hundreds of multimedia formats, massive file sizes and difficult uploading methods made sharing personal video clips on the Web a daunting task for even the most tech savvy individual. With its revolutionary technology, YouTube has given people the ability to easily, upload, tag and share video clips through youtube.com, across the Internet and through email as well as to create their own personal video network. With over 6 million videos served up daily, hundreds of thousands of active members, and investment support from Sequoia Capital, YouTube is set to become the Internet's premier video service. What is YouTube? YouTube is the way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. With YouTube you can:
Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide
Browse through thousands of original videos uploaded by our member community
Get video codes to embed videos on any website
Securely and privately show your videos to friends and family
Find, join and create video groups to connect with people who have similar interests
Organize your favorite videos into Playlists
Subscribe to videos from your favorite users and tags
Integrate YouTube with your application or website with our suite of developer APIs YouTube is completely, 100% free. Absolutely no strings attached. YouTube is a young, dynamic, evolving company constantly striving to provide our users with the absolute best online video service imaginable. We always encourage our users to contact us with their thoughts, suggestions, feedback or otherwise random ramblings. Make sure to check out our Blog to keep up to date on all the latest YouTube developments.

December 15, 2005 - YouTube, a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, today launched its new service that allows people to watch, upload, and share personal video clips at www.YouTube.com and across the Internet. As more people capture videos through digital cameras, mobile phones and other devices, YouTube makes it fast, fun and easy to broadcast those experiences worldwide. On a typical day, YouTube already is serving more than 3 million videos, adding 8,000 video uploads and transferring 16 terabytes of data. YouTube first opened a public preview of its service in May. "We're moving the equivalent of two Blockbuster stores every day over the Internet, and that's only a start," said Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of YouTube. "The explosion in consumer devices with video and in broadband connections is giving users control over the videos they watch and share, and YouTube is dedicated to making their experience as easy and relevant as possible." Along with connecting users with videos from friends and family, YouTube is delivering entertaining, authentic and informative videos across the Internet. Users are documenting news events as they happen, filming quirky videos about their interests and sharing first-hand accounts of their travels. Watch Your Favorite Videos Anyone can watch the public videos on YouTube. They can search for videos by entering common search terms, or they can browse through videos based on channels of interest, popularity, user rankings, most recently viewed videos and featured videos selected by community recommendations. Users also can register for a YouTube account and create a personal network of videos. Once completing a simple registration process, they are able to save their favorite videos from YouTube, create play lists of videos and connect with other users and friends and family to watch personal videos. YouTube also supports tagging, both by letting users associate a set of keywords with the videos they upload or save in their personal networks and to browse through videos based on other users' tag designations. Upload Your Coolest Clips Prior to YouTube, the burden was on the user to figure out how to make videos available on the Web and to support multiple media players and hundreds of multimedia formats. Through its advanced technology infrastructure, YouTube instantly converts uploaded videos into a format viewable across the Internet without additional software uploads. Registered users simply upload a video from their computers, and YouTube handles the conversions behind the scenes. Videos are turned into a Flash video, making them viewable through every major Web browser, including Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Flash is available to 97 percent of Internet users. "YouTube has removed the barriers for people to move their videos off their devices and onto the Internet," said Steve Chen, a co-founder and CTO of YouTube. "As well as making it easy to upload, our advanced video-clustering and highly-scalable technology is ensuring that watching and sharing videos is fast and fun anywhere on the Internet." Share Your Video Experiences Everywhere Once uploaded, users can make videos public or share them only with specified users such as friends and family. Video sharing on YouTube is not limited to www.YouTube.com. Through its video embedding feature, YouTube allows users to stream videos, both personal and public ones, across the Internet on other Web sites. For example, users can insert their favorite YouTube videos into their MySpace profiles, blogs or personal Web pages. Even as viewers watch videos across the Web, they can immediately share a video through e-mail from within the video player itself. Using a subscription feature, registered users can subscribe to one another?s videos, creating personal broadcast networks where users stay updated on the latest from their favorite video creators. Hurley adds, "YouTube is a community motivated to watch and share videos because they can experience real life through the eyes of people like themselves, not only through the lens of traditional television."