iFilm/ Viral Video

Like a virtual flea market without leaving your home, ebay is able to clean out your closets or fill them up. With iFilm and other sites such as YouTube, you can find short films and commercials that you long forgot.

What is fascinating about these sites is that it is all digital so no searching on old VHS or beta tapes. Unlike VHS tapes, the material is extremely ephemeral. Material can be posted today, and gone later today. What is amazing about all this, is that it is free and quick to retrieve.

From a librarian's point of view, it is not the best access for searching however this will improve as the digital film sites improve and grow causing and necessitating the need for a better way to search and for a search engine.

I have enjoyed YouTube for a long while, and have found many things that I thought were long gone and remembered many commercials and short films from when I was a child. It is nice to see all this preserved, however an archive is about as difficult to obtain as a to dam the Atlantic Ocean!

That said, it is a wonderful concept and execution of the Internet.