You Want More? More???

As I've said in the past, YouTube oughta be against the law. It's sooo addictive. You find one video, then another, then another. You keep thinking about other interesting things that you might find, and you search for them. Whole days, nights, and weekends can be frittered away with this method.

The tagging on the videos generally works well, and I've always found that where there's one video that you want to see, there's another neat one linked to it. Whether you like to see Kimbo Slice beating up poor suckers in the backyard, or Jascha Heifetz playing Bach, YouTube has you covered.

Downside: it's bandwidth-intensive. Read: if you have a dial-up connection, you may as well forget it. Or, if you happen to use a public computer somewhere that they're only running on a T1 line, or something of that sort. In reality, it's sites like YouTube that have caused so much difficulty for a lot of organizations, SLCPL included. The internet has become far more saturated with video, audio streams, high quality pictures, and active content, like Java and Flash, than it was a few years ago. When you're transmitting only text, there's no bandwidth problem. If one or two kids are playing online games or watching YouTube videos, suddenly, everything slows to a snail's pace. I don't know if the communication infrastructure can ever hope to stay ahead of the appetite for bandwidth, but it's clear that infrastructural changes will be required, if we're to really realize this whole Web 2.0/3.0 dream. Only those with fiber-optic connections need apply.