The New York Times this week published a list of the top ten college course lectures on YouTube; the list includes a five-year-old lecture from the I School's Info 141 course (formerly SIMS 141), "Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business".
"YouTube, with its view-count ticker, has become a useful tool for determining the popularity of an online video," observes the Times, "whether it has gone ‘viral,’ as the kids say."
"The Top 10 videos are the first lecture in a series, except No. 6" — The I School lecture — "which is smack in the middle of a course on search engines. That lecture may have been boosted by a guest — Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google."
During the fall 2005 semester, the entire Info 141 course was webcast on webcast.berkeley.edu and on YouTube; the high-ranking video (with guest lectuerer Sergey Brin) is the class session of October 3, 2005. The rest of the Top 10 list includes courses from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the Institutes of Technology, along with two other UC Berkeley courses.