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Modern Methods For Sharing Innovation
The New York Times is running a story about Johnny Chung Lee, a hardware hacker made famous for his projects which modified the Nintendo Wiimote to do things like positional head tracking and multi-touch display control. The article focuses on the suggestion that Lee's use of YouTube to demonstrate his innovations has done a better job of communicating his ideas than more traditional methods could. Quoting:
"He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others. Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. 'Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,' he says. 'If you create something but nobody knows, it's as if it never happened.'"
Just take 30 seconds of time and bandwidth, by viewing this starting half-way through from 2:30-3:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw
Now tell me that those 30 seconds don't convey more via video than could be conveyed through 30 seconds of reading abstract symbols.
Fun fact: YouTube now lets you link to a specific time in a video, by added a time-index anchor at the end of the URL. For example, add #t=2m30 to the link you just posted.