Something I inherently felt about the rise and success of Youtube and On Demand video and TV seemed to click when I happened to be re-reading  59 Seconds by Professor Richard Wiseman. Besides being packed full of quick and useful ways to make practical improvements to your life, it also has a lot of references to relevant studies. And one referred to the role of pets, particularly dogs, in lowering stress and blood pressure.

In addition to real pets, Wiseman also mentions studies which used the Sony Aibo (Now discontinued but available via Ebay), and videos of dogs playing, and all had a similar effect at different levels.

And that’s something which people might have missed when they often dismiss a lot of Youtube or online video content as ‘dogs on skateboards’. Broadcast news has long ended bulletins, particularly on slow news days, with the ‘cat stuck up tree’ or similar heartwarming tale of human or animal misfortune. But if you’re in need of cheering up, being able to find endless videos of cute pets is guaranteed online. Including Tillman, who ended up advertising the iPhone:

But besides helping us to feel better and less stressed, there’s also an interesting flipside, which is that most of the media are in an endless race of shock and awe to try and compete with the real-time internet in new and exciting ways. The coverage of the recent London riots, and the events currently unfolding in Libya as I type, are both constantly providing examples of traditional and new media organisations and reporters trying to utilise, and compete with, the internet at the same time, leading to a strange dichotomy.

Even as seemingly clueless presenters commentated on the evils of social networking during the London Riots, the BBC and other media organisations were repeating content from, and sharing content to, Twitter, for example.

And at the same time, there’s a filtering and curation element of popular entertainment, away from the ever-increasing Fox-style shouting controversy that seems to permeate modern TV news reporting, in that I have never had access to so many broadcast channels and yet struggled to find anything which doesn’t irritate me at the very least. The reasons are many, included my awareness of all the alternatives, the possible effects of lowering resources and funding but trying to fill more hours, and the fact that so much content is being endlessly repeated across channels.

But I can get away from all this with my personal selection of things I enjoy watching, and that might help me relax as much as a skateboarding dog, or might be useful, inspiring, or god forbid, actually relevant to me at a time when I’m actually able to watch it. It would be interesting to figure out what I watch most online, but I’m certain the TED Talks would be up there, along with MotoGP, and various racing and FPS game videos, for example. And then a selection of robots, 3D Printing, Extreme Sports, Vintage Rallycross, and a mix of music videos.

But I’m never actively seeking out the news anymore. I’m letting it come to me via social networks and social sharing sites, and it essentially filters into:

• stuff that people in my local area are talking about and bringing to my attention.
• stuff that people in my areas of interest are talking about, and that I’m actively interested in – so technology,privacy,hacking, etc.
• stuff that’s so big it makes an impact across everything – earthquakes, riots, tsunamis, overthrowing governments.

But a lot of this passes through RSS feeds and Twitter so quickly, that I’m only looking at stuff which matters to me in some way, and I wonder whether that’s actually making me a happier person. I still worry that politicians are all corrupt, corporations are inherently evil, the economic downturn means everyone will be poor for 50 years unless they’re rich enough not to worry, and crime may or may not be on the increase (although in the reality most people exist in, it’s whether crime is actually likely to personally affect us).

But I’m spending less time reading about all of it, and more time actually figuring out how I might be able to do something about the parts which are more important to me – for instance, looking at what the likes of the EFF and Open Rights Group are doing with regards to privacy.

Wait, wasn’t this about skateboarding dogs?

Maybe skateboarding dogs have actually have 3 noble purposes in our lives:

• When we watch them, we feel more releaxed and our stress decreases.
• Because we enjoy watching them (and then sharing links with friends), they made sites like Youtube extremely popular extremely quickly, and far more popular than the corresponding broadcast channels, because there’s no barrier to anyone uploading a video of a skateboarding dog they may have spotted.
• And the huge popularity of video on-demand sites has enabled them to reach scale, even if there have been concerns they aren’t making enough money. That scale gives them some elements of power in terms of advertising and revenue, and that means their survival is continued, allowing millions to upload more content that Hollywood could ever produce (for example), and a breadth of content which ranges from babies laughing to lectures on quantum physics and everything in between. Projects like the Khan Academy, for example, which allows anyone with access to the internet the ability to learn via video tuition.

So the next time you’re laughing at a talented hound riding a skateboard, it’s worth remembering that they’re also serving a noble purpose in better the world…