3. Finding Videos to Watch
With millions and millions of videos available on YouTube, how do you find the ones you want to watch? Well, finding videos on YouTube is a lot like finding stuff on the web—you can browse for it, or you can search for it. It's really quite easy.
Browsing for Videos
Most new users start out by browsing YouTube for interesting videos. Browsing is perhaps the best way to discover new videos; you can click through the categories until you find something you like.
How to Browse
Browsing YouTube is a simple matter of clicking a link—and then another link, and then another link, and then another link. The more you click, the more you discover.
Actually, many people are introduced to YouTube when they're sent a link to a particularly interesting video. If you receive such an email, just click the enclosed link; this will take you to the YouTube page for that video, and playback should start automatically.
For example, when you choose to browse by category (which we'll discuss in a moment), you start by clicking the Categories tab on the YouTube home page. This takes you to the Categories page, shown in Figure 3.1. On this page you click a link for a particular category—Music, for example. This displays a page of featured videos in the Music category, as shown in Figure 3.2. To view an individual video on this page, just click the video.
Figure 3.1. Browsing YouTube via the Categories page.
Figure 3.2. Browsing featured videos in the Music category.
The only problem with browsing is that you don't get to see everything that's available. Instead, you're browsing a list of featured videos in that category, as selected by the YouTube staff. Still, it's a good way to explore what's available—and to see the best of the best.
Browsing by Category
For most users, the best way to browse YouTube is by category. You do this by clicking the Categories tab.
YouTube organizes its videos into the following major categories:
- Autos & Vehicles—The place for videos about planes, trains, and automobiles—car chases, monster truck rallies, flight films, you name it
- Comedy—Home of the funniest stuff on YouTube, from amateur video high jinks to stand-up comedy routines to clips from movie comedies
- Entertainment—A hodgepodge of short movies, odd stuff, and other random entertainment
- Film & Animation—Where you find classic cartoons, animated shorts, computer-generated animation, short art films, and the like
- Gadgets & Games—The category for all sorts of technology products, video game hints and reviews, and the like
- Howto & DIY—Home for online instruction and training videos
- Music—One of YouTube's biggest categories, full of music videos and classic performance clips from major artists, as well as performances from amateur and up-and-coming musicians and user-compiled music montages
- News & Politics—Where you'll find the most newsworthy clips on the YouTube site, including stories from professional news organizations, live events captured by video cameras, and more
- People & Blogs—A combination of funny home videos and personal video blogs
- Pets & Animals—The place to find both Stupid Pet Tricks and cute animal videos
- Sports—A vast repository of both professional and amateur sports highlights
- Travel & Places—The place to find homemade travel videos and neat nature clips
The main Categories page lists two featured videos for each category, which you can click to view directly. To view all the videos in a category, click the category link on the left side of the page or the See More link in the category box in the middle of the page. Click that link and you'll see a list of the featured videos for that category.
Browsing by Channel
Browsing by category isn't the only way to see what YouTube has to offer. YouTube also organizes videos by channel, which is a great way to find videos by people whose tastes you share.
A channel is simply a personal collection of videos by a specific YouTube user. Every YouTube user has his own channel. You might not know it, but you even have your own channel—those videos you've saved as favorites as well as any videos of your own that you've uploaded.
To browse YouTube's featured channels, click the Channels tab on the YouTube home page. From here you can browse the following types of channels:
- All Channels—Doesn't actually list every YouTube user, but instead displays the most-subscribed-to channels
- Comedians—Lists channels by users who sign up for YouTube in the Comedian category, typically professional comedians, makers of funny short films, and the like
- Directors—Lists channels by users who sign up for YouTube in the Directors category, typically amateur or independent film directors showing their wares on the YouTube site
- Gurus—Lists channels offerered by experts on specific topics
- Musicians—Lists channels by users who sign up for YouTube in the Musicians category, typically professional or amateur musicians who upload their own performance clips or music videos
- Partners—Displays channels by YouTube's commercial partners: Adult Swim, BBC, BBC Worldwide, Beggars Group, Capitol Records, CBS, Charlie Rose, Fox News Blast, G4TV, GameTrailers.com, GSN (The Games Network), NBA, NBC Entertainment, Nettwerk Music, NHL, PBS, Playboy, Showtime, Sony BMG, SpikeTV, Sony Pictures Classics, SubPop Records, Sundance Channel, TNA Wrestling, TVT Records, Universal Music Group, VH1, Warner Music Group, We Put Out Records, and more
- Politicians—Lists channels maintained by major presidential candidates
You can access any user's channel page by clicking the user's name underneath a video, comment, message, or other item.
When you click a channel link, you see that user's channel page. Channel pages can be simple (such as the author's own channel shown in Figure 3.3) or professionally designed (such as the partner channel shown in Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.3. A typical user channel page.
Figure 3.4. A professional channel page by a YouTube partner—in this case, CBS.
On a simple channel page, there are links at the top to view more from this user—the user's own uploaded videos, favorites, playlists, groups, friends, subscribers, and subscriptions. Click the Playlists link, for example, to view the playlists that this user has created; click the Subscriptions link to view which groups this user has subscribed to, and so on.
If you like the videos from this particular user or partner, you can subscribe to her channel. When you subscribe to a channel, you'll be notified of new videos uploaded by this user. To subscribe, simply click the Subscribe button near the top of the user's channel page.
Learn more about channels, subscriptions, and the like in Chapter 12, "Joining the YouTube Community—And Creating Your Own Channel."
Browsing the Most Popular Videos
Another fun way to browse YouTube is to journey through the most popular videos on the site. This is a great way to find the latest viral videos—those videos that are taking the web by storm.
There are several ways to browse YouTube's top videos—all dependent on how you define "top" or "most popular." Here's what you can do:
- To see the top picks from the YouTube staff, simply examine the featured videos on the YouTube home page, or, to view recent staff picks, select the Videos tab and click the Recently Featured link.
- To see the most-viewed videos today, select the Videos tab and click the Most Viewed link.
- To see the top-rated videos (videos that other users thought were the best), select the Videos tab and click the Top Rated link.
- To see the videos that generated the most discussion among other users, select the Videos tab and click the Most Discussed links.
- To see the videos that were most often selected as user favorites, select the Videos tab and click the Top Favorites link.
- To see the videos that were most linked to from sites outside YouTube, select the Videos tab and click the Most Linked link.
- To see the videos that garnered the most user responses, select the Videos tab and click the Most Responded link.
Within any category or type of video, you can view the newest videos by clicking one of the links in the Time section on the left side of the page—Today, This Week, This Month, or All Time.
Searching for Videos
When you're not sure what you want to watch, browsing by category or popularity is probably the way to go. If you have a particular type of video in mind, however, searching is a better approach.
You can also search YouTube from the Google Video (video.google.com) site. Any Google Video search returns primarily YouTube videos—another benefit of Google's owning YouTube!
Conducting a Search
Searching YouTube is easy. Search boxes, like the one shown in Figure 3.5, are located at the top and bottom of every YouTube page. (It's the same search box, just in different locations.) To search for a video, simply enter into this search box a keyword or two that describes what you're searching for and then click the Search button.
Figure 3.5. The YouTube Search box.
For example, if you want to search for Bruce Springsteen videos, enter bruce springsteen in the Search box. (Capitalization isn't necessary.) To search for clips of dancing monkeys, enter dancing monkey, and so on.
Working with Search Results
When you click the Search button, YouTube returns a list of videos that best match your search criteria, such as the one shown in Figure 3.6. If you see a video you want to watch, just click it. Otherwise, you can narrow down a large list by using the links on the left side of the search results page:
- Search In—Restricts your search to only Videos (default), Channels, Groups, or Playlists
- Sort By—Sorts your results by Relevance (default), Date Added, View Count, or Rating
- Refine by Category—Lists only those results in the selected category
Figure 3.6. The results of a YouTube search.
So, for example, if you want to limit your search to the newest channels in the Comedy category, you would click Channels, Date Added, and then Comedy from the search results page.
Each search result contains the following information:
- Opening frame from the video
- Title of the video
- Total length of the video, in minutes and seconds
- A short description of the video
- Tags for the video—keywords that describe the video's content (click a tag to see more videos that have the same tag)
- When the video was added to YouTube
- Which category the video resides in
- The user who uploaded the video (click the user's name to see all videos in his channel)
- Number of times the video has been viewed
- Star rating of the video (The rating is from one to five stars—more is better.)
- The number of total ratings of this video
See a video you want to watch, but can't watch right now? Then click the "+" sign at the bottom left of the video thumbnail; this adds the video to your QuickList. You can then click the QuickList link at the top of any YouTube page to revisit these flagged videos.
Finding Out About New Videos
YouTube video fans are constantly on the lookout for the latest, greatest, and coolest YouTube videos. But short of searching the YouTube site on a daily basis, how do you find out about the newest videos that might interest you?
The trick is in converting YouTube searches into RSS feeds. If you're familiar with blogs, you're familiar with feeds; these are constantly updated lists of new posts to a blog, to which users can subscribe. A feed subscription uses Real Simple Syndication (RSS) technology to notify subscribers of all new posts.
What most users don't know (yet) is that YouTube serves its searches as RSS feeds. All you have to do is create an RSS feed URL from the keyword of a YouTube search; you then add the feed URL to a feed reader program or feed aggregator website. Here's how it works.
First, find a tag that describes the type of video you're looking for. For example, if you're looking for new Beatles clips, the tag would be beatles. If you're looking for new clips about the U.S. space program, the tag might be nasa. Then you use this tag to create a feed URL, like this:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/tagname.rss
For example, to create a feed for those Beatles clips, you create the following URL:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/beatles.rss
And the URL for the NASA feed looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/nasa.rss
If you're searching on two or more tags, add them to the URL but leave a space between them. For example, to search for clips of Gnarls Barkley, use this URL:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/gnarls barkley.rss
Add this URL to your feed reader or feed aggregator, and you'll be notified whenever new videos that match this search appear on the YouTube site.
Some of the most popular feed reader programs include FeedDemon (www.feeddemon.com) and Feedreader (www.feedreader.com). Popular feed aggregator sites include Bloglines (www.bloglines.com), Google Reader (reader.google.com), and NewsGator (www.newsgator.com).