10 Years of YouTube Viral Videos

YouTube has revolutionized so many industries, not the least of which is education. We have the ability to learn so much thanks to our ability to upload videos to YouTube. Need to learn how to use a computer software application like Photoshop? Look on YouTube. Need to know how to change the oil in your car? There's a YouTube video for that. You can learn to play guitar, cricket or chess simply by watching a YouTube video. When it comes to religion, YouTube has removed the borders that once existed. I call this the globalization of the Internet and the YouTube video has played a monumental part. YouTube has certainly been one of the Internet's "killer apps" in the past decade.

As I learned firsthand in December 2011, YouTube videos can also be the format to express your opinion about social issues... or a particular politician. The YouTube video of my parody of Rick Perry's offensive campaign commercial has been viewed over 231,000 times. Some might say that it went viral, but it certainly didn't go as viral as some of the most popular YouTube videos of all time, with a couple of those being viewed over a billion times.

The Verge put together a compilation of the evolution of ten years of the YouTube viral video. Watch the video below:

Tablet Web Comments: Pay to Play?

Over the years I've written quite a bit on the topic of the comments section on the Web. I often refer to this section located under Web articles as "The Wild Wild West." In fact, after my first article was published on The Huffington Post about five years ago I become inundated reading the many comments from around the world. Very few of these comments were on topic and most were, quite frankly, of an anti-Semitic nature.

I remember asking my colleague Rabbi David Wolpe, who had already written several articles for The Huffington Post, how he managed to read and respond to all these comments -- and whether he was alarmed by the hateful nature of so many of them. He responded to my inquiry with something to the effect of: Just write, don't bother with the comments.

The ability to post comments anonymously was often thought to be the problem that allowed trolls to comment off topic on articles posted on the Web and so many websites changed their policies forcing users to sign in before leaving comments. That solution only goes so far since users can create dummy accounts and many of these trolls don't care about masking their identities. Over the years, many websites have come up with solutions to the problem of what I call "garbage comments" (e.g., 9/11 conspiracy theory comments on a cute YouTube video of my kid playing guitar). These solutions include the ability for users from within the "community" to be able to vote up or down comments and also to report violations of the terms of service or commenting policy. This is a good start and I think all Web media sites should employ this strategy, allowing users whose comments typically receive up votes to filter to the top and banning users whose comments are often reported for abuse.