306 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age What makes YouTube so special? At least the site offers a better user experience compared to the average commercial Internet site. It supports various browsing modes – search by keyword, by popularity, by related content, or just plain luck. Comments, groups, and topics can be created freely. There are no registrations to worry about, if you just want to search and download. If you want to upload material, you do need to register, but the service takes care of most other trivia, freeing the user from potentially tricky tasks involving codecs and bitrates. Perhaps the key success factor, though, is the unrestricted nature. YouTube does not force its users to behave in a certain way, but rather applies comparatively loose suggestions. It does not tell the users what to do. This makes people hang around and experiment with the site. In a way, a YouTube upload gives added semantics – that is, meta- data – to the original clip. Currently the metadata is not too structured, residing mostly in the form of tags, comments, and contacts. Auto- mated metadata harvesting could, and undoubtedly will, be added to the site without major changes to the user interface. Are YouTube videos personal content? In our view, yes. The source material may not be, but that act of posting a video to YouTube is personal content. It creates a point of reference from which other people can provide commentary, further material, and sharing the post. The video post becomes attributable to the uploading person. Even though the uploader’s identity may be imminent for a while, it can quickly get lost, as copies of the material are created and then reposted. Still the original post remains, and the uploader can later refer to it as “my post”. However, YouTube videos are usually not private content. Not many people would upload their sensitive personal material to the Net. Different sites and channels are needed for sharing content for more tightly controlled access. Then again . . . given that there are zillions of clips available, maybe privacy risks are a lesser concern, after all. Witness the following conversation from the readers’ pages of the T3 magazine (December 2006, p. 45): Q: I fancy recording a birthday video greeting for my mate, and thought about putting it on YouTube, but don’t want everyone to have a go at it. Is there a better way? – [A T3 reader], Swindon