You Want Skateboarding?

The collection of skate clips at YouTube.com is the next best thing to the act itself, an online vault of skating at its purest. The stars of tens of thousands of clips archived there range from no-name flailers cutting the concrete in the family driveway to today’s biggest pros jet-setting to big-buck contests. From young-gun cityscape technicians spontaneously choreographing better use for urban architecture to crusty bowl dogs sniffing out abandoned swimming pools.

Then there’s the lunatic fringe, the obscure and unstylish skaters on which no skateboarding magazine would ever waste a mega-pixel. But they’re skaters nonetheless, having fun with their friends and putting it out there for the world to watch. And, of course, they’re delivering enough good hard slams to keep the most bloodthirsty viewer laughing for hours.

Crank up the volume and check out the Squarebuckets Crew clip (www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM8jtxsa_7U). They come off as drinking buddies with a skateboarding problem, but their well-crafted post captures some solid pool plundering and a littering of ancillary antics. Or, for the sort of big-picture insight that connects skateboarding to the highs and lows of dear life itself, cue up the short documentary “Skate Dreams” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1NCwx0t4T4).

Whether they’re partying or pondering, online contributors add daily to an already tremendous--and free--library. Their relentless output has the skate companies trembling and scratching their heads about how to penetrate this sprawling rank-and-file subculture.

When a two-minute low-res clip with an earsplitting soundtrack posted by a nobody gets exponentially heavier viewer traffic than a professionally shot, star-stacked mini-movie uploaded by an industry giant, something’s right in the skateboard world.

Something’s right when marketing executives are forced to scour YouTube for new blood for their teams and throw online contests that promise free gear to the grass-roots crews that submit the best clips to the company’s own YouTube sub-site.

The future of skateboarding rests where it ought to, in the hand-held cameras of the skaters who will define it. And that future will be brighter if the lazy among us can pry ourselves away from our screens long enough to actually step on a board.