Youtube

Wide Tube of Sports There's no all-sports version of YouTube, the insanely popular Web site where regular people send in amateur video clips for the world to watch. But a few sports sites are tinkering in the weird world of "user-generated content. " Rivals.com has a site called TailgateTV (tailgatetv.rivals.com) that allows college football fans to upload videos and photos from tailgate parties. Fans are forbidden from posting anything inappropriate - or, more important, any images from games.

Maybe someday, Alesia Brown joked, the futuristic Star Trek idea of instantaneously producing food items directly from an advanced computer system will come to Philadelphia's Central High School. If it does, said Brown, the teacher technology leader and computer support coordinator at Central, she would not be surprised. In the 30 years that Brown has been working with computers at Central, she has seen many changes in technology and its uses at the academic magnet high school.

She gets Valentines from sock monkeys, date requests from Moscow, unsolicited signed photos from Billy Joel and concertos written in her honor. Yet, this Philadelphia lady still eats on the floor. Nora the Piano Cat, a YouTube piano-playing sensation whose first video has drawn more than 15.7 million hits, will add another trophy to her wall when she accepts the Cat of the Year Award from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York City tomorrow.

In 5.44 seconds flat, Zhewei Wu can assemble a set of 12 plastic cups into a complicated formation, then take it apart. Yes, that's a competitive sport. Wu is one of the fastest in the world. He is 14, an incoming freshman at Central High School who, along with friend Steven Wu, is a member of the U.S. Sport Stacking team. The pair demonstrated their talents for a rapt audience at Wednesday's Philadelphia School Reform Commission meeting. Superintendent Arlene Ackerman praised the two, and called speed stacking a "captivating new sport that is growing rapidly in recognition and value around the world.

It's a little late to order a retreat in what has been dubbed the "YouTube war. " American soldiers' video and blog postings from the front lines in Iraq are as much a part of the stateside understanding of the war as images on evening newscasts. Even the Pentagon is using the Internet video-sharing sites to showcase action in Iraq, both as a means of reaching out to a young, recruit-rich audience and to document U.S. military successes. So it's somewhat puzzling that the Department of Defense just decreed that soldiers overseas will find access blocked to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular Web sites on the military's computers and networks.

The behavior of Philadelphia sports fans continued to create a buzz Monday as video emerged on several websites that appears to show a small child drinking from a beer bottle while watching Sunday's Phillies-Padres game at Citizens Bank Park. The identity of the child, who appeared to be 3 or 4 years old, could not be ascertained Monday night. The identity of adults nearby and the contents of the bottle were also unknown. The video was taken from the official broadcast of Sunday's game.

Age: 27. Neighborhood: Fishtown. Job: Nielsen?Kellerman Company, which manufactures waterproof electronics and weather devices. "I love my job. " Love me, love my dog: Owns a Jack Russell mix. If her life were a reality TV show, it would be called: "Great Adventure . . . Season Pass. " Dance fever: Former Eagles cheerleader. Claim to fame: "I'm the YouTube 'weather girl' for my job. Weather buffs think I'm cool. " Nominated by: "My sister Deri and my best friend Kristie Gonzales.

This year, for the first time, the presidential campaign is waged not just in the whistlestops and hustings of America, but also on YouTube and the viral video world. Candidates, partisans and citizens are uploading, downloading and distributing ads, "gotcha" moments, parodies and video bites in an endless series of sliced-and-diced mutations. If 2004 was the Year of the Blogger, 2008 is the Year of YouTube. And in the last seven days, the GOP and Democratic campaigns have stepped up their fierce online-video battle.

LIKE MANY from the region who left to attend college outside of the area, Sean Monahan had the "wooder" teased out of him. While attending the College of Wooster in Ohio, his newfound friends poked fun at his Philly accent. "I knew that the vocabulary was different. I say 'hoe-gies,' and not a lot of others say 'hoe-gies,' " said Monahan, who grew up in Bensalem and Langhorne and now resides in the Southwark section of Philadelphia. It's not that Monahan hadn't noticed his accent before.

SEOUL, South Korea - The reclusive, impoverished state that denies Internet access to all but a handful of its citizens has, improbably, become an online sensation. With North Korea's chubby dictator, campy propaganda videos and near-daily threats of attack against its neighbors and the United States, the secretive police state has never been more searched for, tweeted or discussed. Some semi-chagrined analysts say the North, for the first time, has gone viral. Although Pyongyang tries every few years to drive up regional tensions and win political concessions, this latest saber-rattling has more forcefully captured global attention, in part because the mysterious and potentially dangerous North so perfectly feeds the appetites of the Internet and social media.