This is a nearly hour long presentation to the Library of Congress by Michael Wesch who gave us The Machine is Us/ing Us last year. His talk is about his (and his students’) study of video practice on YouTube. I’ve never been a big contributer to YouTube but I have been seriously involved in videoblogging and web video for four years now. Most of that time has been spent contributing to and interacting with the community of people centered around the Videoblogging email list where we’ve seemed to have gone through an experience parallel to the one Wesch outlines in his talk.

One of the ideas Wesch brings up by way of McLuhan (at about 26:00) is that of new forms of self-awareness. I know I certainly have a much different view of myself today than I did four years ago. And now, not only how we view ourselves as individuals but also how we collectively view ourselves is becoming something that’s undergoing constant revision. What exactly this provides is hard to say because things are rushing along at such at such a rapid pace. Sometimes, like Reuben was talking about recently, it may make you feel a bit crazy but ultimately we want this because as my experience has shown me and what I think Wesch concludes is that, this will be an extraordinarily good thing.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Ubiquity is another release from Mozilla Labs that, along with Aurora has me thinking about the future of not just how we’ll use the web but also everything on our computers.

Over the last few years web apps have really transformed the way I use a computer. Every day I have less and less need for actual desktop applications. If it weren’t for all the video production I do on a daily basis I could just grab most any computer with wifi and be instantly connected to just about all of my stuff. And now that the iPhone has a mostly usable web browser, most of the time I don’t even need to take my laptop with we me anywhere. I love that.

So in the middle of watching this demo I started thinking it would be great if all the applications on your computer, not just web apps, could play together like that or maybe all your apps would be web apps (more likely) and your operating system would be the “browser.” Then you could just invoke a new view, document, video, website, virtual world or whatever and combine information in whatever way you needed to right then instead of in whatever way a particular application lets you do it. I can’t wait.