It’s YouTube on ’roids
9/11/2007
'What would you get if you crossed a fairy tale like Little Red Riding Hood with a film like Groundhog Day? Well you’d get a brand-new big, bad wolf trying to kill a kid...every day. Last week the wolf was MySpace.com. Yesterday it was YouTube.com. Today’s it’s a bigger, badder wolf named Stickam.com (pronounced stick-cam).
As independent start-ups like the video-uploading site YouTube sell out to button-down tech companies like Google, there’s a strong push to clean up the site’s content and hire watchdogs to make sure copyright and decency standards are upheld. The result of “hall monitors” showing up in their previously unpatrolled virtual space literally chases teenagers to the back alleys of the Internet where they can find far edgier Web sites. One of them, the wolf-du-jour Stickam, allows users to upload or watch unfiltered live broadcasts from Web cameras. Now kids can set up a Web cam in their bedrooms and show the world...whatever they want. In real time.
Obviously, this has culture watchers sharpening their axes. In a New York Times interview, WiredSafety.org’s executive director Parry Aftab says, “The only thing you get from the combination of Web cams and young people are problems. Web cams are a magnet for sexual predators.” And Jason Katz, founder of a Web-cam chat service called PalTalk, says, “There are just some people who, if you give them a Web cam, are going to take off their clothes.”
Of course, Stickam is acutely aware that as popular sites such as YouTube clean up their act and pull out of the seedier side of cyber-town, there’s vacant space for them to fill. “Letting people do whatever they want is one way for these sites to differentiate themselves,” says Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst, in a Times interview.
Two other wolves setting up shop in Red Riding Hood’s neighborhood:
Dailymotion.com—A Paris-based, internationally flavored YouTube competitor that has, so far, not implemented the copyright and decency standards of its higher-profile American cousin.
LiveLeak.com—This new video-uploading site, based in London, positions itself as an online chronicle of “unvarnished truth.” That’s code for grisly videos of warfare and victimization around the world. The highlighted video on the site a few weeks ago was an Egyptian man being sodomized by police officers with a wooden pole.
And tomorrow’s Big Bad Wolf? A good candidate might be BlasphemyChallenge.com. Started by filmmaker Brian Flemming, director of the God-bashing documentary The God Who Wasn’t There, the site encourages people to directly “break” the Bible’s “unforgivable sin”—blaspheming the Holy Spirit. One of the 400 young people who’ve so far taken up the challenge is a girl named Lindy, who uploaded a five-second video of herself to YouTube, saying: “Hi, my name is Lindy, and I deny the existence of the Holy Spirit and you should too.” Another self-described blasphemer, Michael Lawson, says, “We want to show that we really mean it when we say we don’t believe a word in [the Bible].”
As independent start-ups like the video-uploading site YouTube sell out to button-down tech companies like Google, there’s a strong push to clean up the site’s content and hire watchdogs to make sure copyright and decency standards are upheld. The result of “hall monitors” showing up in their previously unpatrolled virtual space literally chases teenagers to the back alleys of the Internet where they can find far edgier Web sites. One of them, the wolf-du-jour Stickam, allows users to upload or watch unfiltered live broadcasts from Web cameras. Now kids can set up a Web cam in their bedrooms and show the world...whatever they want. In real time.
Obviously, this has culture watchers sharpening their axes. In a New York Times interview, WiredSafety.org’s executive director Parry Aftab says, “The only thing you get from the combination of Web cams and young people are problems. Web cams are a magnet for sexual predators.” And Jason Katz, founder of a Web-cam chat service called PalTalk, says, “There are just some people who, if you give them a Web cam, are going to take off their clothes.”
Of course, Stickam is acutely aware that as popular sites such as YouTube clean up their act and pull out of the seedier side of cyber-town, there’s vacant space for them to fill. “Letting people do whatever they want is one way for these sites to differentiate themselves,” says Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst, in a Times interview.
Two other wolves setting up shop in Red Riding Hood’s neighborhood:
Dailymotion.com—A Paris-based, internationally flavored YouTube competitor that has, so far, not implemented the copyright and decency standards of its higher-profile American cousin.
LiveLeak.com—This new video-uploading site, based in London, positions itself as an online chronicle of “unvarnished truth.” That’s code for grisly videos of warfare and victimization around the world. The highlighted video on the site a few weeks ago was an Egyptian man being sodomized by police officers with a wooden pole.
And tomorrow’s Big Bad Wolf? A good candidate might be BlasphemyChallenge.com. Started by filmmaker Brian Flemming, director of the God-bashing documentary The God Who Wasn’t There, the site encourages people to directly “break” the Bible’s “unforgivable sin”—blaspheming the Holy Spirit. One of the 400 young people who’ve so far taken up the challenge is a girl named Lindy, who uploaded a five-second video of herself to YouTube, saying: “Hi, my name is Lindy, and I deny the existence of the Holy Spirit and you should too.” Another self-described blasphemer, Michael Lawson, says, “We want to show that we really mean it when we say we don’t believe a word in [the Bible].”
Youth Ministry “Don'ts”
Youth Ministry “Don'ts”
Youth Ministry “Don'ts”