YouTube hits 7th anniversary – 7 videos you can’t miss

23 Apr 2012

Seven years ago today, a young fella by the name of Jawid Karim uploaded the very first video to a video-sharing site he co-founded with his fellow PayPal employees Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, YouTube.

Since then, an influx of videos have followed that first video, ‘Me at the Zoo’, onto YouTube. Sixty hours of video are uploaded every minute, or one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second. Viewers watch more than 4bn videos a day, according to the site.

A little more than a year after ‘Me at the Zoo’ went online, internet search giant Google acquired YouTube in autumn 2006 for US$1.6bn in Google stock.

In honour of the seventh anniversary of the first video being posted on YouTube, Siliconrepublic.com presents its selection of seven YouTube videos that have been shared, emailed, reposted and commented upon:

1.     Me at the Zoo

We had to include the very first YouTube video ever, shot by Yakov Lapitsky. The video features Karim at the San Diego Zoo.

 


2.     Hot Problems

Have this song and video been made to be deliberately bad as a way to go viral or not?  No matter, the simplistic lyrics of the song and questionable performances in the video have been likened to Friday by Rebecca Black.

 


3.     Yu Ming is Ainm Dom

An endearing video of young Yu Ming, who spends six months learning Irish only to come to Ireland and become a little perturbed with his experience in Dublin. That is until he meets an older gentleman in a pub (played by Frank Kelly, aka, Father Jack on Father Ted).

 


4.     Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Carnegie Mellon Prof Randy Pausch delivered his last lecture at the university on 18 September 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his presentation, Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer on 25 July 2008.

 


5.     Charlie Schmidt’s Keyboard Cat

It’s ridiculous – a cat in a dress shirt playing the keyboard – but just try not to laugh. It’s a YouTube classic.

 


6.     Homeless Boy Steals The Talent Show

Sung-bong Choi hasn’t had the easiest time in life, but he decided to audition for the talent show Korea’s Got Talent, anyway. He had told the judges he sang because it made him happy, and he didn’t think he could sing very well. He was wrong.

 


7.     “Thriller” (original upload)

Take more than 1,500 inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in Cebu, Philippines, teach them the dance routine to Michael Jackson’s song Thriller, and see what happens.

 

Tina Costanza was a journalist and sub-editor at Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com