"YouTube- an insiders guide", reviewed by Ellis Brayham, ApplesBC Computer Society.
O'Reilly kindly sent us this new book, "YouTube, an insiders guide", by Michael W. Dean. Its claim to fame is the self described, "This is the only YouTube book worth getting". Well, that's a pretty lofty claim to make, and because of my limited working knowledge of YouTube I will limit my review of this book to the things I do know.
YouTube is a barely 3 year old program, developed by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, and aided by another PayPal pioneer Jawed Karim, who together designed this video sharing program. It proved to be instantly popular, and after only a year, was bought by Google for $1.6 billion!
YouTube has become the top video site, hosting every thing from homemade videos to millions of commercial sites, plus political, educational, social sites, and everything in between. With the Google inspired search capability, it is increasingly being used as a sales medium, and this is the direction this book encourages you to explore.
Some of the things I liked about this book are the hands on approach, so that even a novice gets a quick understanding of the medium, its potential, the legal side implications, site promotion, examples of what you can get and do for free, as well as quite a detailed explanation of the costs of building a larger site. I confess I didn’t realize the commercial possibilities, and opportunities of YouTube. It has become a huge business opportunity and with this book its possible for just about anyone to seize the opportunity to promote their pet project - whether selling something, promoting a political party, or just showing off.
On the other hand, an aspect of the book I didn't like was the self importance of the author, but if you can ignore that, the information in the book is worth every penny.
Here's a 21st century marvel - a unique idea that has made the web a birthing place for unlimited business opportunities, just like Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, iTunes etc. etc. each of which have created multi millionaires, who took the boundless possibilities of the web, and found within it, a need that they could fill. That's the very essence of this book - here is YouTube, here are the tools - now get out there and make it your own.
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