This weekend I went over to San Francisco to attend the first ever YouTube Live!, a big concert / faire / festival celebrating YouTube. It was lots of fun, and much more enjoyable than I was expecting overall.
My original major objective in going was to hear Julia Nunes, who was scheduled to be one of the major performers, playing with the support of several other YouTube ukulele luminaries. I was hoping I might get to meet her and let her know how much I enjoy her music and videos. Not being into hip-hop, I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing some of the top billed performers, so Julia was the main thing drawing me there. But I was pleasantly surprised at both the opener, Katy Perry, who had a very good voice and a lot of charisma, and the finale, Akon, who I’d never heard of, but who was pretty good.
I decided to take public transportation, so I had a bit of a trek, via BART and SF Muni, finally making it over to Ft. Mason in San Francisco. The first thing I realized is that I am really old. :) That is, I’m way older than the target demographic of this event. Standing in line, I realized I was older than 90% of the people there. Oh well, time doesn’t stand still. Prior to the main event, there was a carnival like festival going on outside of the Herbst Pavilion which had musicians, jugglers, acrobats, artists, break dancers, skate boarders, … along with representatives of a number of famous YouTubbers. This was fun to troll through. I saw a number of YouTube folks whose videos I’ve watched, but I felt too shy (and felt it might be creepy) to go up to them and say hello. It’s one thing for a bunch of teenagers to run up to these folks who are roughly their age, it’s another thing for some middle aged guy. Even so it was fun seeing them.
Not including the folks on stage (e.g. What-the-Buck), in the crowd I saw TheHill88, The Winkone, Fred, Jamie from Myth Busters, the Free Hugs guy, Kristina from the fiveawesomegirls, and Sam Friedman (isnoggedharry).
The layout of the main event was a bit of a disappointment. When I got the (free) tickets, I assumed that we’d be sitting in the audience of the event. There were two stages, the main stage at the front, and a back stage. The seats around the main front stage were reserved for VIPs, so us average folks were standing behind a barrier behind all the seats. I was near the front, so the view was still all right, but as the venue was flat, anyone tall in front, or folks standing up on the seats, blocked the stage view completely. I could still see everything I wanted to fine, and since the tickets were free, I couldn’t complain too much. The only real grrrr was that Julia and the “Ukulele Orchestra” played from the back stage. Had I known that I could have been real close, but I had maneuvered myself towards the front, so I was nearly as far from the back stage as there was in the general area. :( But I could still see them and hear them ok. Unfortunately there was such a mass of people, I never saw her in person, but that’s OK.
All in all, a fun adventure.
