To make better use of YouTube

My use of YouTube has been pretty spineless: I sometimes check Viral Video Chart (mostly for outrage or Zeitgeist, which seems the same thing all too often… ), I use YouTube’s keyword search for obscure people and instruments and musical genres, and I grab the occasional clip and save it to the Hoard (where it basically sits around, untagged and unlinked), and sometimes I Embed a video in a page or a blog posting. I’ve scarcely used the ‘Favorite’ button, and until today I confess that I wasn’t inspired to even think about social uses… but (via The Programmable Web) I stumbled upon Walter Rafelsberger’s Metaportal der Medienpolemik, which mashes Dapper and YouTube to construct an RSS feed from one’s YouTube Favorites. Here’s mine, for anybody who might be interested… and I vow to use the Favorite button more systematically.

Edwardian voices

My recent immersion in digitizing vinyl (lately it’s been Greek stuff from the 1930s) has put me in mind of the problems and possibilities of managing collections of sound, musical and otherwise. An hour of BBC Four on British dialects, based in an archive of hundreds of recordings of WW I British POWs in Germany, hints at a huge task of digitization and a delicious prospect of analysis.