The vocabulary about the internet in bold is explained in the glossary below the text. Then mp3 is me reading the text out loud to help with your listening skills. Enjoy the videos and don’t forget to vote for your favourite one in the poll before the glossary 
If your broadband has got good bandwidth and you can stream videos quickly and without any glitches, then you probably watch the funny videos that get sent to you by your friends. These days though, a video you e-mail to afew people through cyberspace soon gets sent on to other friends and then their friends and so on and within moments, suddenly it goes viral – where millions of people watch, comment on or download the latest quick-hit funny or amazing video. Some of the reasons why they spread so quickly is that they are easily accessible: you don’t have to sign-up for any site membership, set up a password or give out your contact details. It’s just a quick hit on a site like Youtube or Vimeo to make your friends laugh…and hopefully they will think you are funny too because you sent it to them. One of the latest examples of an internet video getting a huge number of hits in a very short space of time is of a Half-man Half-dog eating a tasty snack. If you want to start trying to make your own viral video, then having a pet do something funny is a good place to start! Bizzle, the dog has had 1,719,330 hits in just a few weeks This followed on from Fenton, the dog (doing what every dog wants to do) in Richmond Park near London. The vid has had 2,715,436 views since being released – Have a look and you’ll see why 🙂 One of the kings of funny viral videos is “Charlie bit my finger”. The original video has had an incredible 394,799,406 views. There are also loads of copies of this video, as other people try to cash in on its success as the amateur camcorder clip has become a global phenomenon. A few years ago, it would have just been a video for the family, but with the advent of social media, if you upload a short clip like this to Youtube (especially if it shows children being funny), it can be big business.When a video goes viral, Youtube enter into a ‘partnership’ with the creators (in this case, it was Charlie’s Mum and Dad) and share the profits from the adverts that are placed around the video. It is claimed that Howard, Charlie’s Dad has made over £100,000 from this one little 57-second video. Not bad, eh? However, once your video is out there in the public-domain, there will always be a lot of critics, as well as fans. Youtube is famous for having long comment threads, with small-minded, endless arguments that end up going round in circles. But if you’re lucky enough for your video to go viral, you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. [poll id=”2″]
INTERNET VOCABULARY
- Broadband
- internet connections that have greater bandwidth than a modem
- Bandwidth
- how much data you can send through a connection: e.g. the bigger the bandwidth, the faster the speed of videos
- to Stream
- (here) to play / to watch a video
- Glitches
- technical problems
- Cyberspace
- the whole range of inforamtion available through computer systems
- Download
- to copy data from one computer system to another
- Sign up
- to join
- Set up
- to establish
- Contact details
- your name, address and phone number
- Hits
- views of a video
- Social media
- websites where people set up communities and share info, messages & content
- Upload
- transfer data to another computer system
- Clip
- a short video
- Public domain
- available to everybody and not copyrighted
- Comment thread
- a part of social media sites where you can write your opinion
