Tuned In

JPTV Jr.: Short Attention Span Theater

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Virginia Heffernan over at the New York Times blog mill has one of those wish-I’d-thought-of-it-first posts, about YouTube as a parenting tool. I thought of her post this morning as the Tuned In brood shared a light media snack of the OK-Go treadmill video. (The panda sneeze is another favorite, and a favorite pastime is doing random searches for unusual animals; no zoo visit these days, it seems, goes un-Webcast.) For a small child, web videos are bite-sized, often un-language-dependent, and narratively uncomplicated. What the grown-up and toddler YouTube watcher want is not that much different at heart: to see someone do something really cool, over and over again.

Heffernan mentions that my close personal friends at Babble have a selection of parent-and-kid-oriented videos at their site, but the collection is still fairly small. I suspect there’s a business opportunity in creating a definitive link guide to kid-appropriate Web video. It’s such a good idea, in fact, that I’m certain someone has already done it, and that better parents than I already know about it. Do you have a favorite kids’-Web-video directory? (Besides the YouTube categories like “Pets & Animals.”) And what have you seen out there that can top that baby panda?