As you all have witnessed in the past several months, I spend a part of every day on YouTube. Most of that time is spent watching clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, or watching funny and risque commercials from Europe, or strange clips from various local news shows. All of which is to say that 99% of what I watch on YouTube has been, at some point, professionally produced.

But there is a whole other side to YouTube that I mostly ignore, and that is the huge number of videos of people sitting in front of their computer and talking about whatever is on their mind. Essentially, they’re blogging in video form. And while I love to read blogs, I don’t much enjoy watching someone talk.

That may be changing, however, and all because of one video that I somehow stumbled upon this morning.

Now, here is the thing with that video. It was originally posted on August 5th, and in the last two weeks, it’s been viewed over 1,476,509 times. It’s generated 8678 comments. 2851 people marked it as one of their favorite videos, and it has received over 15 honors, including Most Discussed, Most Linked, Most Viewed, and Top Favorite of All Time.

That’s not all though. The creator of the video, who goes by the name Geriatric1927, continues to make videos. He made two or three more after the one you just saw. The first was another introduction, because the one you just watched was lost in the crowd at the time. In the second, he bitched about a news item that pissed him off. His third was a “video response” to someone else’s movie, and in it, he talked about who he was and why he loves YouTube.

Apparently, the response from the community became overwhelming at this point. And he made a video to talk about it:

Geriatric1927 made that video, which he entitled “Telling It All: Part 1,” a week ago. Since then, he’s posted a new video almost every day, and he’s now up to “Telling It All: Part 7.”

I don’t know about you, but I find it very moving that a 79-year-old widower who was in World War II can say about YouTube, “This has been one of the major changes and breakthroughs in my life, and it’s given me a whole new world to experience.”

So everyone, raise your glass, and let’s all hope that, at 79 years of age, we’ll all still be capable of finding something new to experience. Here’s to Geriatric1927. Cheers.