The New York Times wrote recently about the first video ever posted on YouTube. Here’s Jawed Karim telling us that he’s standing in front of the elephants. Further, he explains that the “cool” thing about elephants is that they have really long trunks. Karim would later update his video to show an annotation that points out the goat sounds on his “meet at the zoo” video.
Jawed posted this on April 23, 2005, and would later receive $64 million in Google stock for his contribution to YouTube. He was last seen two years ago in Hawaii. (actually to be fair, Jawed signed in as recently as four days ago).
Says NYTimes Writer Virginia Heffernon:
When this technique of redundancy was used in the films of Godard, it was considered the height of sophistication, a comment on the way movies pile on information: they show, they narrate and they describe. The elephants are unmistakable to viewers, and yet Karim identifies them. Then he names the iconic shape right in front of us — “long trunks” — lest anyone miss that long trunks equal elephants equal long trunks.
If we didn’t believe Heffernon was disguising disdain with subtle sarcasm, we would have thrown up in the back of our throats.
You know, I’m not sure why Jawed picked that username when he presumably had any other option available. It sounds like a b-grade beach movie. I’d have chosen the username Fred or Smosh or Nigahiga or something.
P.S. Here’s my first video (Scary Santa), posted 9 months later than Jawed’s. It has not earned me $64 million dollars yet.
