Baby Vids Are Breeding

There was a time when the Internet belonged to geeks and teenagers. When my high school friends and I discovered Yahoo Chat and Hotmail, our parents watched only in confusion or concern. But that didn't last long -- I can pinpoint the exact moment that the Internet crossed the generational divide. I was sitting on a streetcar, and across the aisle, a young woman was showing off her first ultrasound to a friend.

"Awesome!" said her friend. "You should make that your Facebook profile pic!"

As the Internet generation grows up, they're pulling the web along with them. And like new parents everywhere, they want to talk about their children. From parenting blogs, to Flickr streams of baby photos, to -- you guessed it -- viral video.

It's not all about cute photos -- the most industrious have branched out into instructing other parents. Take DadLabs, a web channel featuring short parenting videos aimed at fathers. And they're eager to teach others how to share their children with the Internet, with segments like this one, called "Deliver a Great Birth Video."

"Daddy Troy" gives recommendations on what video camera and memory card to choose, and how to film a birth while also supporting the one in labour. Then he instructs the viewer on how to "export for web" and post the birth movie on MySpace or YouTube. It's true -- birth announcement videos are the new scrapbook.

Take this mini-documentary complete with alt rock soundtrack. It, and ones like it, might be intended for friends and family, but as the parents of the laughing baby know too well, sometimes the kid flicks go viral (the laughing baby got over 45 million views making it the ninth most viewed video of all time). And this video, featuring an irritable mom in labour and her annoying cameraman, has topped 100,000 views.

Thanks to digital photography, childhood is now more obsessively documented and more public than ever before. But there's a downside. The parents might want to watch a birthing video over and over on YouTube, but what if it screens in the poor kid's middle school classroom? Perhaps more important, could the time parents are spending editing videos be better spent playing catch with the kids or teaching them to read? Knowing YouTube, the tiny subjects of these videos will one day post response videos and let them know.

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