"Hello YouTubists...!"

Ok, I must say that I missed some of the YouTube's glamour, but I'm discovering some interesting things about it now. I though it was all about "lonelygirl15" and kids posting their skateboarding videos.

Today I came across "geriatric1927" (http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=geriatric1927), number 1927 probably being his date of birth. This grandpa has found YouTube, and an amazing audience there, to tell about his life, and especially about his life during the years of World War II in England. I find it adoring, I thought that only the young generation uses YouTube, and there he is: this nearly 80 year old man, sitting in front of his computer, telling us all about his life. And that he learned about editing music and putting images in his video, and all!

It's worth watching a few of his babbles, some of which have been watched over 100 000 times by YouTubists. He seems to always start by saying "Hello YouTubists...!", he talks about war times, his youth, life after war and such. It's like anyone's grand-dad; taking time to tell you a story in his own time, space and pace. Very touchy! He also goes into talking about the media exposure that he's received, about communicating with people who post him messages and who send him mails, etc. It's gotta have taken his life into totally new dimension!

I love when new media is used in a new context and especially when its take-up reaches new groups of users that we never thought it might. Imagine the designers of YouTube, early in the day when they thought about setting it up, creating use cases for this! "Use case no 12: the 3rd generation using YouTube to record their experiences of life - hey, this might also help to integrate the oldies into the Web 2.0...". Well, I don't think!

This post is just to remind myself about wonders of the Web!