My @YouTube channel isn't completely lost, it's just harder to find

First published 5/14/12

Previously I had a YouTube "channel" that was fun. I added YouTube videos I liked to 'favorites' and/or 'playlists'. After you clicked through and played a song, you were still on my channel. In 9 months my channel had more than a million views.

On March 7, 2012, YouTube ruined its channel system.

Now if you click on a 'playlist' link it's hard to find my channel, and if you click on a 'favorites' link you can't detect my channel at all.

So I'm slowly converting all of my 'favorites' links to 'playlist' links, but for now here's how to find my channel:

-when you play a song with one of my 'playlist' links you'll see, at the top of the video player, the name of the playlist, and my name; if you want to leave the playlist and look in the other playlists, click on my name and you'll come to my channel; there you'll see a list of 20 playlists; some of my lists are listed on the front page, to see the rest you have to click "view all"

-when you click on a 'favorites' link, there's no reference to my channel at all, so the only way is to go to http://www.youtube.com/raybeckerman, where the playlists are listed [some are on that front page, for the rest you have to click "view all"].

Sorry.

I hope YouTube realizes how dumb they were to do this.

If any of you know some easier way to work around these barriers, please shoot me a comment. Thanks.
Update 12/18/12 I've also learned that with the new YouTube interface, if you're using a mobile device, or an iPad, many of my links will just take you to my playlists, but won't take you to the actual song. Sorry about that.

(Shortened URL for this post: http://goo.gl/HSJsm )

More insanity: Twitter's blocking tweets as "unsolicited mentions"

Originally published 2/23/12

It has always been my practice to try to credit authors of tweets by using their @twittername so that (a) I am informing my friends as to where on twitter these sources can be found, and (b) I am letting the authors know that I thought well enough of their material to tweet it.

Similarly, when I tweet songs, if the performer is on twitter, I add in or substitute the performer's twitter name, again to let them know I liked their material and to let my friends know where the performer can be found on twitter.

I just learned today that ALMOST ALL of my tweets that are in my feeds are being blocked by twitter as "unsolicited mentions".... i.e. because I wasn't "solicited" by the author or singer, therefore I'm wrong to credit them under their twitter name.

This is insanity, and highly anti-conversation, anti-sharing, and anti-social.

Meanwhile, it now creates probably hundreds of hours of work for me to edit the several thousand music tweets I've prepared, and to go through and edit the hundreds of feeds I monitor.

And from now on, you won't be able to tell from my tweets whether or not the author or singer is on Twitter, or what their user name is, and the authors and singers won't know that I tweeted their material.

So if you're someone whose blog posts or performances I tweeted, and you think I've gone silent... I haven't. I'm going to try to substitute #username for @username, but those won't be showing up among your 'mentions'.

I don't know what to say except !?&%#?!