a lot of stuff and nonsense from eclectech

I was surprised today when a friend pointed out it was August. Losing track of what day it is usually means I've been quite busy, I'm not sure what losing track of the month means...

Anyhow, reaching August means I've experienced two months of my YouTube experiment. It's been... interesting. I've uploaded 13 pieces, 2 of them have been featured* and over all I've had over 500,000 views. I have to say I've been impressed with the number of views for a new user, but there is a price to pay. The comments.

Oh my.

Obviously some of the commenters are lovely people, providing praise, support or constructive criticism. Then there are the others.

- Threads seem to get a massive amount of spam, be it other YouTube videos, external web sites or images of some minor celeb showing flesh or involved in some scandalous activity. It becomes rather tiresome.

- I lost count of the number of times I was accused of being drug-crazed. Speaking as someone who is ludicrously clean-living at the moment (for the benefit of baby-tech) this accusation got rather irritating. I just like playing around with images from my own little world, and playing with non-narrative animations.

- I think I might be too old for this whole "Add me as a friend" business. I don't want to offend people but I find invites from strangers to be their online friend a little odd. Don't get me wrong, I like meeting new people and having a chat about some common interest, but I feel some interaction is required before a stranger becomes a friend. On reflection this is very possibly me getting hung up about the terminology. Hmm.

- On the flip side of over-familiarity, there are a fair few people seem to believe that anything they don't personally like is worthless and leave terribly rude comments. It makes the place feel very unfriendly, emphasised by people take the hump that your video was chosen to be featured instead of their video.

- Gay was frequently used in the pejorative sense. Has that become acceptable again? This worries me.

Och, I don't know. Some people have been lovely, it's been good getting my work out to a new batch of people (even when a bunch of them think it's pointless rubbish!) and it's always interesting dipping your toe into a new community but maybe I'm just too used to being in control of my own online space to fit in with one so out of my control. I think I'm going to keep getting some pieces up there at for the time being, but I'm pleased the page impressions at eclectech.co.uk are so much higher than my views at YouTube... I can still consider it the main space from which I can 'broadcast myself'.

That's quite reassuring.

Right, that's quite enough self indulgent twittering about silly things. I leave you with a blast from my past discovered at, you guessed it, YouTube. A track I first heard on the Annie Nightingale show sometime in the eighties. It becomes very special half way through.

Fish Heads

* As far as I can tell this means someone who works for YouTube has decided they're worthy of being stuck on the front page ready for a few thousand regular YouTubers to decide they made a big mistake.