O.K., I admit it—YouTube is so six months ago. By now, even my grandmother has probably watched a video of a few thrill-seeking guys attempting some ridiculous stunt (most likely involving an explosion and the exclamation “sweet, man!”). Though online video sharing isn’t exactly breakthrough news, YouTube.com is so ridiculously addictive that we couldn’t help but give it some (much-coveted) Hit This Site attention.
Now, explaining the addictive intricacies of YouTube would require an in-depth exploration of a typical college student’s psyche (and frankly, you just don’t want to know), so I’ll just stick to the basics. YouTube was launched last December to provide an online forum where the “broadcasters of tomorrow” could share the “special moments” they catch on tape, and viewers could discover “the quirky and the unusual” (now that’s an understatement). When they coined the phrase “Broadcast Yourself,” the YouTube folks probably weren’t sure exactly what they’d get (but a big serving of homemade karaoke seemed likely).
And then a funny thing happened: YouTube users began feeding off each other, drawing both ideas and inspiration as they tried to one-up the previous clip. A perfect example is the strange case of Mentos and Diet Coke. Here’s what happened: Some curious candy lover dropped a pack of Mentos into a soda bottle and caught the resulting (explosive) chemical reaction on tape. Before you could say, “Did I do that?” there were 10, then 20, then hundreds of videos of Mentos-fueled madness on YouTube. (Heck, even David Letterman got in on the action.) But the pièce de résistance arrived courtesy of two lab-coated nerds, who used 200 liters of Diet Coke and 500 Mentos to create an artificially flavored replica of the famed Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas.
And this, in a nutshell, is YouTube’s real charm: With such an “extremely viral” service, the most creative (and insane) videos get the most hits, and therefore inspire the most entertaining and extreme responses. So put on your thinking cap, grab a camcorder and try something outrageous—you might just start a new YouTube craze. Come on, you know you want to.
—Ashley Sisti
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