YouTube has revolutionized the world. The ease of uploading, sorting, and downloading videoclips has given permanence and ubiquity to anything on television. Video capabilities in cell phones have made everyone a producer, and everything in the world good material for a clip on YouTube.
Unsurprisingly, although YouTube is world-wide, the culture it projects does not reflect every part of the world, and certainly not equally. But the technologies that make it work are available to everyone, and we are beginning to see the emergence of local YouTubes - or operations like YouTube which offer specific cultures to the whole world.
AapkaVideo in India is a cultural anthropologist's dream. This site not only has free Indian movies in the Bollywood tradition, but user-generated content ranging from music videos to coverage of cricket matches to scenes of Indian cities and the countryside.
As an author, I'm always on the look-out for online sites that can provide authentic information about places I might want to include in a story, but might not be able to visit immediately. AapkaVideo certainly does that beautifully for India. I hope it is the start of many more localized YouTubes for other cultures around the world.
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