The End

Well this is it. This is the last blog post for this blog. The end. The grand finale. The closing of the curtain. The final bow. The fat lady is right about to sing her last note. It's been fun and laborious, rewarding and menial, all sorts of lessons have been learned. I hope anyone who has read my blog enjoys it and will mourn it's passing.

Passing on is taught to us from an early age as an inevitability. We all know that no one is immortal and that death is there to balance life in a constant flow. Everything fades eventually. Eventually, according to some science, everything in the universe will spread out and eventually lose heat to entropy and fade away. Instead of focusing on such a large cosmic scale, I wanna talk about my blog topic one more time, Youtube.

Will Youtube ever die? It's a tricky question. It has remained popular throughout most of the digital age and has seemed to find a foothold on the mobile app platform, an important milestone. The reason why Youtube creating a successful app is important is because eventually the "web" will be replaced by a mobile app based system that is quicker and more efficient. Youtube seems like it will be able to survive this transition. So when will Youtube dissapear? It seems to fill a purpose that will be needed through the next several generations, and dominates the market well enough that any group would have trouble surpassing it. It is hard to tell when Youtube will die, because it is mainly dependent on other websites and technologies being developed. Twitter led to the recent downfall of Facebook, and perhaps someday an app will lead to the downfall of Youtube.

Another important aspect of the question is what is meant by the word "die". Most people would consider Myspace a dead website, but you can still go to it, register for an account, and start using it. Even if no one uses a website and can still be accessed and used, such as my blog, and therefore isn't "dead". I think a better question is "When will Youtube become unpopular. A lot of it depends on the Youtubers to keep producing entertaing material and for Youtube to keep updating and redesigning.

Some institutions can stay a long time. Certain colleges have been around for centuries, some Confucian schools for millenia. I believe that Youtube has a strong and valuable enough principle that it could survive centuries if it stays on the forefront of the tech curve. However,  a Youtube four hundred years from now might be completely unrecognizable to us today.

Unfortunately all things, Youtube and otherwise, must come to an end. Even when Youtube is gone, it is my hope that there will still be online platforms for creative people to share their art. For a final time, thanks for reading.

The Voice of Broadway

As we near the end of this blog I would like to call back to the beginning of my blog. I originally started this blog for music and humor. I have always been inspired by this, and I definitely worked it into a lot of my posts on Youtube. I have always had a great reverence for the ability of music to bring people together. One man who has always inspired me is an icon on modern Broadway, Aaron Tveit.

One of the things that I love about Aaron Tveit, besides his absolutely wonderful voice, was that his background is so similar to mine. He came from a suburban background, was involved in a wide variety of activities, and through his pursuing of music he came to be one of the biggest Broadway stars in the modern age. He just continuously worked and learned and performed his way up the ladder to becoming a major star. He did a mock audition at his college with the director of Rent's national tour and ended up getting his first gig in Rent. As he moved up through several smaller pieces and national tours he eventually received his big break with his starring role in "Next to Normal". "Next to Normal" is an extremely powerful show about a dysfunctional family trying to hold it all together, and it relates really well to anyone whose family has fights sometimes, which I believe is everyone.

From there, Aaron Tveit became wildly popular on Broadway, starring in major Broadway hits such as "Wicked" and "Catch Me If You Can" and the oscar-winning movie version of "Les Miserables". His voice is absolutely mesmerizing, and manages to keep it's luster and sparkle even through the recordings, a very tough task. I listen to his music all the time now, and am grateful to the show choir for introducing me to his works. I found myself singing "Alive" from "Next To Normal" in the hallway on the way to class. Not only has he been a star, but he is now transitioning to TV acting through the show "Graceland". He was already labeled as "The next Hollywood Heartthrob". I wish Aaron Tveit all the success in the world.

Aaron's story makes me excited for what the future holds for myself. I don't see myself becoming a huge Broadway star like he was, in fact I think it is foolish to try to picture your future. However, it does make me extremely hopeful that through my work and dedication I can accomplish something amazing. I encourage everyone in the world to go out and accomplish something great so that I can write a praising blog post based on your life. Also, I hope that you listen to some of Aaron Tveit's work, it's truly wonderful.

Aaron Tveit Bio- http://aarontveit.net/aaron/biography
Les Miserables Aaron- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me7DMpMaKI0
Catch Me If You Can Soundtrack- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqCweDxaUHY&list=PLYUQXUa0t9ps6LEeUwMWQJTZxgfPskNAW
"Alive" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjpH15kuTps

Leaving

Well it's the last week of blogging and, as much as I did enjoy writing the blog, this will probably be the last few blog posts I write for this year. For anyone who has read my blog I would like to say thank you. If there is even a slight possibility of someone who religiously follows my blog posts and gets enjoyment from my posts, I want to apologize for the fact that I am discontinuing my blog. If you really feel strongly about my blogging, feel free to leave a comment and I will continue for you. However, I don't think anyone actually reads my blog anyways.

In honor of my leaving, I want to take a look at those Youtubers who retire from Youtube. It may seem weird to the average viewer that Youtubers can retire. This is due to the fact that Youtubers often are young vibrant people that enjoy what they do thoroughly and so a rare amount of Youtubers have retired. For example, NigaHiga has been doing Youtube videos ever since he was a teenager at the dawn of Youtube and it seems as though he is going to keep doing them as his career for the next decade or so. I thoroughly encourage him to continue as he is absolutely wonderful. As Youtube continues and the original Youtubers become older, the amount of farewells and retirements from Youtube will grow.

Youtubers do retire. Usually when they do it is due to either a lack of interest or some other issue that got in the way, such as another job opportunity and such. One such channel that has retired was called "Your Favorite Martian" who composed and animated original music videos. During his heyday he pulled in tens of millions of views to his music videos, and they are still being watched today. However, his channel is now called "This Project Has Been Retired" and no new videos have been added. It's a shame to lose his creativity and humor when it came to writing music videos.

Recently a Youtuber who retired was the gamer "JonTron".  John Tron and his parrot Jacques entertained millions of people with his clever reviews and vlogging. He was connected throughout the gaming community to many other channels and worked through "NormalBoots", a collection of gamers. With the widespread influence John Tron had, it is no surprise that his fellow Youtubers were wonderfully respectful and honorary of him when he decided to retire from the "JonTronShow".

One of the gaming channels he was connected to called "Game Grumps" even released a special video called "Ode to Jon" which commemorated his humble beginnings on Youtube and wished him the best in the upcoming years. It was a wonderful tribute to John.

I hope that as my blog finally dwindles away, someone was impacted enough to write an "Ode to Adam", but I think I might be aiming too high. Anyway, thanks for reading.

Ode to Jon- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNizrobWjBU
JonTronShow- https://www.youtube.com/user/JonTronShow

Working Together

The amount of traffic Youtube gets every second is ridiculous. Just to show you how ridiculous it is, please visit this link http://onesecond.designly.com/. This is a website called "Every Second on the Internet" and it shows you how much activity occurs on the internet every second such as google searches, facebook likes, or youtube views. I was genuinely surprised to find that there are more youtube videos viewed every second than google searches made. There is enormous power in that amount of people. The website also shows you how many of each item has been made since you have been on the website. I had been on the website for around 300 seconds now, or about five minutes, and more than 14 million youtube videos have been viewed. That is an insanely large amount of people, about one twentieth of all the people in the United States had watched a Youtube video in that time period.

Something in my mind connected this with another website my AP Biology teacher Mr. Horton had told me about. It was a website that researchers posted polypeptide chains to a public forum and then regular individuals such as you or me would spend the time figuring out how it folded into proteins. The scientists benefited from the large amounts of free effort and individuals benefited from feeling as though they had contributed to the forward advance of science, and they had. This kind of work is called crowdsourcing, in which a professional or a group will post work that is too large or menial to be done by professionals, and instead relies on normal citizens. Imagine it as a form of online volunteering. There are many other examples of this online such as scallop counting for scientific research, the game spore which relies on user-made creations to generate it's characters, and even a documentary titled "The American Revolution" which was created based on the contributions of individuals.

I think I made this subconscious connection in my head because I realized that the large amount of traffic on Youtube means it inherently has a great croudsourcing potential. How has there not been any sort of Youtube croudsourcing. There has been quite a bit of Youtube charities in which they simply ask their followers to donate to a charity, but I think Youtube would be more effective if they used croudsourcing. The reason why croudsourcing is more effective than charity is because people enjoy being active participants. I would call for Youtube personalities to call for people to contribute to specific croudsourcing activities as a livestream in which the Youtube personality would contribute as well for a period of time. Youtube could even implement croudsourcing through the comments section to report for scientific research or ask questions before videos. The possibility for croudsourcing is endless.

Just as a short reminder, the number of Youtube videos watched at this point on the website is 158 million.

Protein Croudsourcing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit

The vast sea

In case you hadn't noticed from my previous posts, I really enjoy watching the Vsauce videos and recommend them to everyone. They cover a wide array of topics in a really interesting manner, so that everyone will find a video they enjoy, particularly if you are keen on science. Today he talked about the internet and something he said struck me deeply. Most of the terms used for online activities are related to the ocean such as "surfing the web" "pirating" "phishing" "flooding" "navigating websites" "streaming". Even what I am doing right now, blogging, came from the term captain's log or a naval recording of daily events, like a diary. Apparently this arose from the nature of the internet as the ocean, vast, connected, and hidden.

Most people don't agree with the hidden part because they see the web as a place to access things. However there is such a thing as the "Deep Web" or the "hidden web". This is information on the web that can't be accessed by the normal person due to passwords or protective software. While it may seem as if the majority of the web is accessible, we have to realize this is because of the distorted viewpoint. In actuality anywhere from 80 -96 percent of all information on the web is hidden.

Another thing that was said in the Vsauce video that really spoke to me was the calculated statistic that every website is, on average, 19 clicks away from any other website. That connectivity is something I've been talking about for a very long time on this blog, and why that makes the web special.

As these statistics flow in about the vastness of the information, the connectivity, and the sheer amount of activity online every single second of every single day one can easily see why the comparison was drawn to large bodies of water. However, I feel as if we are wasting. I feel like the internet right now is the child in the lunchroom who throws away the burger so that they can eat the fries. We have this extremely powerful engine that is powered by massive amounts of human activity and yet we waste our energy expended on trivialities. Can you imagine a world in which the information and effort on the web could be used in coordination effectively to solve world issues. We almost need yet another hierarchy inside the web to organize it. Adding another tier onto the pyramid of information to regulate and harness the massive quantities entering the system. I don't know how you would even begin to create statistical systems to comb through the entire web, but it would be invaluable. Just another conjecture from your captain. End of log

Wonderful Vsauce Video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scWj1BMRHUA&list=UU6nSFpj9HTCZ5t-N3Rm3-HA

We are the Social Media Generation

When you look at the bottom of a Youtube video you will see a button that says "share". If you click on this a multitude of colorful icons appear. Some of these icons are instantly recognizable by almost everyone in the US today such as the twitter bird or the Facebook f and, yours truly, Blogger. Some of the others are a bit more underground such as digg, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, and two which had only Russian alphabet names. The variety and prevalence of social media is a phenomenon that is relatively new when compared to the internet, a baby when considering the age of technology, and almost non-existentially small when compared to the history of human innovation in communication. It is a phenomenon that is contained within our generation.

Call it generationatism or ageism or whatever you want, but people have a fierce pride in what their generations have accomplished. My parents still listen to rock & roll because their generation came up with it. Grandparents take fierce pride in the military accomplishments of their day and inventions. As our generation is a relatively new one, the one main contribution I think our generation has made so far is the advent of social media. It has already changed the face of the world and the way people connect and interact on a day-to-day basis. As a member of that tech-savvy, digital, generation I am extremely proud.

At the same time, I think most of social media is an absolute waste of time and I would never become a part of it, unless it becomes inconvenient for me NOT to be on it. It is wonderful for connecting those who we can't see on a day-to-day basis, I love Skype for my ability to keep in touch with my brother in Seattle. However, the majority of social media today is used for creating "statuses" for those who see us almost every day to see. It's lost the original purpose of connectivity, and exchanged for a hollow shell of public narcissism. That transition is something that I am absolutely not proud of when it comes to our generation.

I think there is still time to reclaim that one precious innovation that our generation has been responsible for so far. We can transform social media into a force for good, as some are already. We can make it something that will be valued and reminisced upon for centuries to come. It is up to our actions at the genesis of this trend, to make it a positive one. Let's leave our mark on history as our generation. Use social media to start a charity or connect to someone you haven't seen in years. Let's be proud of what we have created, lest we end up with some Frankenstinian nightmare.

The Fear of a Youtuber

For every great thing there is always someone trying to sabotage it. For every comedian there are hecklers, for every politician there are political enemies, for every scientist there are rivals. The main person a Youtuber has to fear is the notorious hacker. Hackers are people who use coding and programming knowledge to gain access to someone's account and either manipulate or seize it. They are unfortunately slightly common on the Internet and can cause major damage.

Hackers are such a threat to security and privacy that many governments have anti-hacking divisions. The Computer Crime Research Center reported that in 2002 the US had 162 hacker attacks on systems that included the House of Representatives, the National Park Service, and the New York Education System. Sometimes credit card companies are hacked into and valuable personal information is stolen. As the world becomes increasingly based on the computer, the hacker becomes more and more dangerous.

On a more trivial level, many famous Youtubers have had their accounts hacked into. The pinnacle of Youtube himself, yes Pewdiepie, was even hacked. His original account was Pewdie before it got hacked and he had to create a new one. Being hacked on Youtube is a nightmare for Youtubers. You lose all of your videos that you worked so hard to create. You lose all of the subscribers that you worked hard to build your fan base. It is like starting again from square one, and it is awful.

The good news is that Youtube has grown and now has larger resources to protect it's channels. The other good news is that people nowadays have a much greater awareness of the dangers of hacking and know how to maintain proper computer security. The bad news is that the amount of people to protect and the amount of hackers is growing as people obtain more knowledge on computers. Another issue is the multiplying methods of hacking.

The future of hacking is a scary one. Cracked did an article about how even nuclear power plants have been hacked before, and several other disturbing incidences that infringe heavily on national and personal privacy and security.

We must stay aware of our computer security as members of the digital age. Stay wise out there on the internet. Hopefully my blog doesn't get hacked.

CCRC- http://www.crime-research.org/news/2002/11/Mess1403.htm
Cracked- http://www.cracked.com/article_19412_8-things-you-wont-believe-can-be-hacked_p2.html