A the USC 24/7 DIY Summit this weekend, the speakers managed overwhelmingly not to be academic droners. Mike Wesch, one of an increasing number of internet-famous professors (The Machine is Us/ing Us and more recently A Vision of Students Today), presented some of the YouTube ethnographic research he and his students at Kansas State University are conducting. The students, in journeying like artery cameras through the digi-spaghetti of YouTubes, have sent back a revealing trail of footage that documents the awkward process they went through as participant-observers— grappling, for example, with how best to address the camera, convey authenticity and construct identities that they could bear to circulate online. Their final projects are available for sampling here.

Alexandra Juhasz, who also studies YouTube, presented a video tour of the site that she created with her Pitzer College students. Some of her findings underlined what most users know instinctively: that YouTube isn’t really designed to facilitate productive discussion, that it can be a time waster, and that “its corporate imperative forecloses democracy in the name of freedom.” Translation: on YouTube, anarchy pays better than democracy. Juhasz vlogged her conclusions, of course, because vlogging is immediate and because immediate video is what she studies. She’s a vlogger professor, a vloggessor!

Her project was also covered by CNN and several other mainstream news outlets, which still seem taken with the exoticism of Youtube and the idea that academics would imagine it worthy of study. But studying YouTube is already studying a history of exoticism, studying a past shock of the new. A new YouTube, for example, arrived with the launching last night of Yahoolive, which enables users to post video in realtime and watch and chat with all the other people watching and chatting about the video as it’s posting and playing. Similarly, last week the beta version of seesmic, a sort of video twitter, was launched by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur.