Archive video of yourself on Youtube

One channel that I used to follow frequently ~3yrs ago was CSPANjunkiedotorg (aka Votersthinkdotorg) and now located at MoxNewsDotcom

(posted on my birthday!)

This guy posts a dozen or so clips a day from all news outlets and doesn’t even have a Youtube partners account to make money directly from it (a lot of his videos go viral with hundreds of thousands of views). He doesn’t even use the Youtube API (admittedly does require programming and took me a month to build robust scripts around and debug those oh so undocumented  squished up bugs) to automate some steps in the process – this guy curates everything by hand on a daily basis. You can see above how stressful and reclusive his job must be following every news cycle and channel. Not to mention having to deal with the public and having to give up a youtube channel out of fear of a 3rd copyright strike.

Here he explains his ability to post news channel broadcasts legally (and probably the same reason he cannot have a partners channel):

Youtube has a policy where if you receive 3 copyright claims from any source (say from a big name company, or a troll) your account gets shutdown permanently and he has received 2 of the 3 strikes. I know after just 1 strike you are not allowed to upload videos longer than 15 minutes (the default for new users and a luxury for those who many total views after registering for a few months). It’s sad to see his videos but it’s nice to see his face once in a while. I remember trying to message him links of videos on methods for maintaining a healthy diet and stress management a while ago as I did have a similar news channel with 2-4000 subscribers (really difficult to do IMHO, but after ~1,000 things tend to naturally grow exponentially), but who knows if he ever believed in them (we can be self destructive by nature).

I thought it was genuinely sad when he first exposed his face after ~2 yrs of anonymous posting and talked about preparing to cry for all of the animals caught in the BP oil spill. I’m just watching the videos of him right now with the Youtube Symphony playing up a storm in the background (this concert was live in Sydney a few moments ago — I like the sand art moment, and how they interview members of the symphony during the concert interstitials to tell each musician’s backstory).
Youtube is such a great place to archive video (personal video) for free. I think the quality and long-term reliability is miles beyond vimeo, flickr, or facebook. I re-encode all of my personal HD mini-camcorder video into one 1080p file, and split every 15 minutes  and set to private for posterity on a secret user account of mine for buried time capsule treasure effect. 1080p HD Youtube saves at ~6Mbps h264 bitrate. And it really only takes two days in the youtube incubator and the revisited video memories seem so long ago while viewing. The appeal is the embarassing exposure and raw capture of plentiful digital recording — Imagine seeing 10 years later (and being drawn right back to that moment), or seeing this old video in your final 10 years (how Maudlin). As long as youtube is around you’ll have your video (unlimited video). I have video I uploaded all the way back in 2006 on youtube – and set to private – and I can’t find the originals in my own house (DVD-Rs and hard drives can degrade and break and get lost) — hopefully youtube has some redundancy program in effect. There are programs out there to download or capture your video from youtube should Google-owned youtube ever announce they will have to downscale or if you ever receive copyright strikes (which can only occur on public videos so you know).