New Book On How To Become A YouTube Star

There is a new book available on YouTube. Unlike previous books, the author seems to have been heavily involved in the community and therefore knows more about the social networking aspects of the web site. 

I had this book on one of my wish lists but I did not realize that the book had finally been published until I real about it on Kevin Nalt’s blog. The book features an interview with Nalts and many other YouTube vloggers and celebrities that I am familiar with.

As you may have gathered from my previous blog entry, I am feeling very discouraged about online marketing and self-promotion. I put a lot of effort into my YouComment web application but YouTube is now including the text of the comment in their email notification so there is less need for a tool to quickly find your comments on a video. It is not just me. I see many people putting a lot of effort into online promotion without accomplishing anything because the sheer immensity of the Internet works against you.

Not that I view YouTube as a means to become famous. I don’t even appear on camera in my videos or on Stickam. Increasingly I just appreciate YouTube for its own sake. I regard the community as an extraordinary collection of weird personalities engaged in a form of dramatic improvisation. But it is not like being in a cast of characters or watching actors at their work. Rather it is like engaging in the actual world of the story. I think this is the ideal situation. For example, which would you rather do, appear on the show Seinfeld, be a member of the cast of Seinfeld, or have Kramer, Elaine, and George as your actual friends? As a fan of the show, I think you would agree that the best fantasy would be to live the story or participate in their world and share their minor adventures.

The desire for fame is a spiritual desire. It is the unconscious desire to give life a mythic quality such as dreams have. This is amply demonstrated in the ancient Greek religions in which  warriors and heroes like Achilles and Hercules would become mythic figures and eventually be worshiped as gods. Fame elevates the individual into the timeless realm of mythology. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell explored the world of the unconscious and discovered its strong yearning for a mythical life although exactly why this is so is a mystery. I am very impressed by the theory that dreams are a form of private mythology. There is a lot of evidence for this. I can remember many dreams featuring mythological monsters, strange quests into underground worlds, etc.