The Youtube Reader.. a great read

http://www.participations.org/Volume%207/Issue%202/snickars.htm Review: Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The Youtube Reader, National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, 2009, ISBN: 9789188468116. Julia Kennedy, University College Falmouth, UK It can be difficult to believe that YouTube’s first video (co-founder Jawed Karim’s ‘me at the zoo’) was uploaded as recently as April 2005. Just over a year later, a similarly amateur video made by fellow founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announced YouTube’s multi- million dollar sell-out to Google. Now that over 2 billion videos a day are viewed on YouTube, and 24 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute [1], the rest is history. It is an embryonic history though, and one that Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, editors of The YouTube Reader make clear is still very much in the making. As recently as 2008, reviewing the literature for a research project into YouTube responses to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann turned up very little in the way of dedicated scholarly work on the site. Alongside Jean Burgess and Joshua Green’s excellent YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009), The YouTube Reader (published by the National Library of Sweden) makes a welcome contribution to the field and provides a lively resource for readers wishing to engage with the YouTube phenomenon from a range of critical perspectives.