Who wants to be famous? Oh of course you do. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t stand in front of the mirror when you were younger with the hairbrush as your microphone mouthing the words to Rick Astley or Shaking Stevens. We all have visions of being a pop star or a TV personality. We all want to be someone better than we really are. That’s human nature.
The good news is that if you have a webcam, a fairly fast internet connection and some spare time on your hands, Yahoo gives you the chance to set up a free live video channel on the net and the ability for others to view your channel.
The end results vary a great deal but hey that’s the beauty of the internet. Everyone on Yahoo Live are amateurs and unprofessional so you’re going to see a mixture of both good and bad which also means you get to see real people, not actors. Think of it as American Idol online.
So do you want to be the next Howard Stern or Jerry Springer? OK then, grab your webcam, your wild, screaming and unrestrained audience and follow me…. because Mark O’Neill has donned his suit and gone in search of some panting groupies!
Setting up the channel is dead easy. You just have to go to Yahoo Live, sign in with your Yahoo account, and then click on “My Channel”
You’ll be asked to name your channel. I named mine after my blog and provided no-one else has snagged the name first, it’s all yours. Then the URL is automatically set up and provided your webcam is plugged in, your channel is automatically live and ready to go! You thought it was more difficult didn’t you? Nope, that’s all there is to it.
Most Yahoo Live channels are radio DJ’s but you’ll also find a few live talk show hosts thrown in there. What you’ll find depends on the time of day you check in. Most of the action takes place at night. At times I’ve seen singers taking requests from their viewers, comedians doing stand-up routines, talk show hosts discussing some weird subjects….it really all depends on what time it is, what day it is and how lucky you are. But truth be told, the site is heavily slanted towards radio DJ’s.
There is a chat box to the right of your screen so your viewers can interact with you and underneath that are webcam screens. If someone chats to you, you can decide to put them on a little webcam screen so you can see them (if you want your visitors to be on the webcam screen, they need to have live channels themselves - which is no big deal - they can make one but never use it). So when I started my channel, I decided to cast myself as “the man that did bad jokes”. Soon I got myself a few visitors and I started on the knock knock jokes…..oh look, here comes Jimmy…..
My visitors didn’t appreciate my jokes and they told me “not to give up the day job”. So I gave them a couple of George Michael hits (”Careless Whisper”!) and one girl screwed her face up like she had just swallowed half a lemon.
Oh well, I guess the entertainment business is not for me. I suppose I’d better go back to editing those Make Use Of articles….sigh! I don’t suppose anybody wants my autograph? Yeah I guessed as much. A guy can dream can’t he?
Jimmy didn’t think much of Yahoo Live and a lot of other people have criticised it but I like it for its entertainment value. Plus as I’ve said, you never know who you’re going to see on there. Isn’t that the beauty of the internet?
MakeUseOf.com Rating
(By) Mark O’Neill is a blogger, professional freelance writer and the editor of Make Use Of. Check out his personal blog at BetterThanTherapy.net
More from MakeUseOf.com :
- MakeUseOf Directory : Read about up-to 5 truly useful web apps on a daily basis.
- MakeUseOf ‘Geeky Fun’: - Fun Geeky Pics, Cartoons and Videos.
No comments:
Post a Comment