Ever pushing the visual boundaries, YouTube is now hosting their first online literary journal, dubbed Shape of a Box.
The journal offers a variety of the written word in aural form — an essay using Movie Maker software, poetry about Jodie Foster, to someone adding music to William Blake’s classic “Tyger, Tyger.”
Basically, the forum takes the sort of videos people normally upload onto YouTube and collects them in an anthology form. The question is: why didn’t someone think of this before? Online zines have been featuring videos with text for years now.
Prediction: other social media will follow with their own onsite zines — Facebook, MySpace, even Twitter. Seems inevitable.
Yet it is also an example of mind out there thinking creatively, to bring content to cyberspace in innovative ways.