Monday, July 31, 2006

Storytelling on YouTube


According to today's Guardian, YouTube is sending out 100 million videos a day to Web viewers. Fully 3.9% of everything zipping around the Web are videos from YouTube, making it the most popular site on the internet.

I'm not a fan of internet video. It's too small, and too blurry. And storytelling doesn't translate well to video in the first place.

But storyteller Tim Ereneta has created a place on YouTube to showcase The Ancient Art of Storytelling. He's found folktales, footage of traditional tellers in Asia, a few contemporary practicing storytellers, and some spooky stories from around the campfire.

Some of the campfire stories are really dark.

Not scary and morbid dark: I mean literally, it's like watching black rectangle for three minutes.