YouTuber A YouTuber is an online personality and/or influencer who produces videos on the video-sharing platform YouTube, typically posting to their personal YouTube channel. The term was first used in the English language in 2006. Influence Influe ...

web developer A web developer is a programmer who develops World Wide Web applications using a client–server model. The applications typically use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the client, and any general-purpose programming language in the server. is used ...

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...

geography Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, a ...

science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, scie ...

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

Mansfield Mansfield is a market town and the administrative centre of Mansfield District in Nottinghamshire, England. It is the largest town in the wider Mansfield Urban Area (followed by Sutton-in-Ashfield). It gained the Royal Charter of a market t ...

Nottinghamshire Nottinghamshire (; abbreviated Notts.) is a landlocked county in the East Midlands region of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west. The traditi ...

University of York , mottoeng = On the threshold of wisdom , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £8.0 million , budget = £403.6 million , chancellor = Heather Melville , vice_chancellor = Charlie Jeffery , students ...

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to t ...

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. ...

International Talk Like a Pirate Day International Talk Like a Pirate Day is a parodic holiday created in 1995 by John Baur and Mark Summers of Albany, Oregon, who proclaimed September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate.University of York Students' Union, under the guise of his Talk Like a Pirate Day persona, "Mad Cap'n Tom Scott". Despite running as a joke, with almost 3000 votes, he won the election and served as the organisation's 48th president. When he was on the podcast Corridor Cast, he said that it was terrible as he did not know what to do, so his team would fill in for him. That same year, Scott and three friends formed the comedy troupe, The Technical Difficulties, with whom he hosted a radio show of the same name on University Radio York. The show later won the Kevin Greening award at the Student Radio Awards. After graduating, Scott made several appearances on British television shows both as a contestant and presenter. He captained the Hitchhikers in series 3 of

BBC Four BBC Four is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by the BBC. It was launched on 2 March 2002

's '' Only Connect'' in 2010 but was knocked out by the Strategists in the semi-finals, and, in 2012, was a presenter in the

Sky 1 Sky One was a British pay television channel operated and owned by Sky Group (a division of Comcast). Originally launched on 26 April 1982 as Satellite Television, it was Europe's first satellite and non- terrestrial channel. From 31 July 19 ...

series '' Gadget Geeks'' alongside Colin Furze and Creative Technologist Charles Yarnold, where he was responsible for the creation of

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

solutions. In 2010, Scott and the Technical Difficulties troupe began the "Reverse Trivia Podcast" series on the Technical Difficulties website wherein Scott would read the answer to a 1984 trivia question card while his fellow panellists attempted to guess the question. The show concluded in 2014 after the commencement of '. Scott received widespread coverage in 2013 for "Actual Facebook Graph Searches", a

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a ...

site which exposed a potentially embarrassing and dangerous collection of public

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin ...

data using Facebook's Graph Search, such as showing men in

Tehran Tehran (; fa, تهران ) is the largest city in Tehran Province and the Capital city, capital of Iran. With a population of around 9 million in the city and around 16 million in the larger metropolitan area of Greater Tehran, Tehran is th ...

who have said that they were "interested in men" or "single women who live nearby and are interested in men and like getting drunk".

YouTube career

Scott registered his main

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...

channel, Tom Scott (originally under the username "enyay", derived from the Spanish name of the letter Ñ, "eñe", a username he has mentioned he "despised"), on 17 May 2006. At the start of his YouTube channel, Scott uploaded several cooking videos in which he would cook food in odd ways. Tom Scott-headshot

Scott produces and uploads educational videos to the channel across a range of topics including

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

,

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...

,

geography Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, a ...

,

science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...

and

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, scie ...

. Also hosted on the channel is the series ' with The Technical Difficulties which ran for eight seasons, from March 2014 to November 2018. In this series Scott would walk through a chosen Wikipedia article, while his fellow panellists attempted to guess facts about the article. He additionally produced explanations of computer security issues on

Brady Haran Brady John Haran (born 18 June 1976) is an Australian-British independent filmmaker and video journalist who produces educational videos and documentary films for his YouTube channels, the most notable being '' Periodic Videos'' and '' Numb ...

's YouTube channel, Computerphile. He is known for wearing red T-shirts, originally worn out of a need for continuity during filming, and because Scott was wearing a red t-shirt in the primary picture he used on his personal website at the time, and used red as the accent colour for the website. At the end of 2015, Scott launched a collaborative YouTube channel with his colleague and friend, Matt Gray, called Matt & Tom. The channel hosted ''The Park Bench'' wherein the pair would sit on a park bench and discuss videos, their travels, and other anecdotes. The series was produced weekly from its inception until 24 March 2018, when they announced that the series would no longer be produced on a regular schedule due to time constraints. In late 2018, the channel became a vehicle for videos of The Technical Difficulties, including "The Experiments" (2018), where the troupe piloted a number of game show ideas. The channel then aired their series entitled ''Two of These People Are Lying'', in which Scott had to guess which of the troupe was giving accurate information pertaining to a

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read ref ...

article whose title he had drawn from a prepared stack. This show has since stopped, with only irregular special episodes being released, and The Technical Difficulties have moved to their own YouTube channel. In November 2018, Scott founded Pad 26 Limited, a company offering content production, format development, and YouTube consultancy. In 2021, Scott challenged

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machine A machine is a physical system using Power (physics), power to apply Force, forces and control Motion, moveme ...

education YouTuber Jordan Harrod to create a

deepfake Deepfakes (a portmanteau of " deep learning" and "fake") are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerf ...

version of him for $100. In a collaboration video posted on his channel, Harrod succeeded in doing so and also discussed the tech and dangers associated with deepfakes. Also in 2021, Scott launched two new YouTube channels: Tom Scott plus on 14 June, focused on collaboration videos with other YouTubers, and The Technical Difficulties on 2 July, inactive until 7 July 2022 when he published the first video. In March 2022, Scott collaborated on Tom Scott plus with musician Beardyman (also brother of Jay Foreman), creating together a

hyperpop Hyperpop is a loosely-defined music movement and microgenre that predominantly originated in the United Kingdom during the early-to-mid 2010s. It is characterized by a maximalist or exaggerated take on popular music, and artists within the genre ...

song named "Shelter me from the rain", which was released under the name "MC HyperScott" to

Spotify Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...

on 5 March 2022.

''Amazing Places''

Scott has a series of videos dedicated to talking about certain places around the world called ''Amazing Places''. In 2016, Scott published a video about the geology of the Wharfe River in Yorkshire, England. In 2020, Scott posted a video where he travelled to Iceland's northernmost islet, Kolbeinsey. Also in 2020, Scott posted a video about Wunderland Kalkar, an amusement park in Germany inside a nuclear power plant. In October 2021, he visited the only float-through McDonald's in the world located in Hamburg, Germany.

''Tom's Language Files''

One series of videos on Scott's channel is called ''Tom's Language Files''. The videos are based on

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

and the grammatical structures of languages. Some of the entries in this series are co-written by linguists

Gretchen McCulloch Gretchen McCulloch () is a Canadians, Canadian linguist. On her blog, as well as her podcast Lingthusiasm (which she cohosts with Lauren Gawne) she offers linguistic analysis of online communication such as internet memes, emoji and instant messa ...

and Molly Ruhl.

''The Basics''

Scott also has a series on computer science, called ''The Basics.'' In these, he covers the fundamentals of IT, and also has made videos on actual exploits, bugs with technology.

2010 UK general election

In 2010, after losing a bet that the

New Orleans Saints The New Orleans Saints are a professional American football team based in New Orleans. The Saints compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the league's National Football Conference (NFC) South division. Since 1975, the te ...

would lose Super Bowl XLIV, Scott ran for

Parliament In modern politics, and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government. Generally, a modern parliament has three functions: representing the electorate, making laws, and overseeing the government via hearings and inquiries. ...

in the

Cities of London and Westminster Cities of London and Westminster (also known as City of London and Westminster South from 1974 to 1997) is a constituency returning a single Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons in the United Kingdom Parliament. It is a borough ...

constituency as the joke candidate "Mad Cap'n Tom". This was a role he had previously assumed in the 2008 race for presidency of the University of York Students' Union, which he had unintentionally won. Coincidentally, Scott stood against the

Pirate Party Pirate Party is a label adopted by political parties around the world. Pirate parties support civil rights, direct democracy (including e-democracy) or alternatively participation in government, reform of copyright and patent law, free sharin ...

candidate Jack Nunn, which was described on the BBC's ''

News Quiz ''The News Quiz'' is a British topical panel game broadcast on BBC Radio 4. History ''The News Quiz'' was first broadcast in 1977 with Barry Norman as chairman. Subsequently, it was chaired by Barry Took from 1979 to 1981, Simon Hoggart from ...

'' as "a split in the pirate vote". As part of his bid, he promised to scrap taxes on rum, have schools offer courses in "

swordsmanship Swordsmanship or sword fighting refers to the skills and techniques used in combat and training with any type of sword. The term is modern, and as such was mainly used to refer to smallsword fencing, but by extension it can also be applied to a ...

and gunnery", hand out free rolls of

duct tape Duct tape (also called duck tape, from the cotton duck cloth it was originally made of) is cloth- or scrim-backed pressure-sensitive tape, often coated with polyethylene. There are a variety of constructions using different backings and adhes ...

to "fix broken Britain", and put a 50% tax on downloads of

Cheryl Cole Cheryl Ann Tweedy (born 30 June 1983) is an English singer and television personality. Born and raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, she rose to fame in late 2002 upon winning a place in Girls Aloud, a girl group created through ITV's '' Popstars ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Orig ...

s due to his dislike of the singer. Scott described his chances of winning in the safe

Conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...

seat of Westminster as "Somewhere 'twixt a snowball's chance in hell an' zero." He received 84 votes (0.2% of the total), including the vote of

Noel Gallagher Noel Thomas David Gallagher (born 29 May 1967) is an English singer, songwriter, and musician. He was the chief songwriter, lead guitarist, and co-lead vocalist of the rock band Oasis until their split in 2009. After leaving Oasis, he formed ...

, the former lead guitarist of

Oasis In ecology, an oasis (; ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment Emojli Emojli was a social application for iOS and Android, created by YouTuber and web developer Tom Scott, and YouTuber and broadcast engineer Matt Gray. Usernames could contain only emoji and users could only communicate using emoji within the app. ...

along with Matt Gray. It was a parody

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed convers ...

-only social network based on social networking application Yo, and was described by ''

Salon Salon may refer to: Common meanings * Beauty salon, a venue for cosmetic treatments * French term for a drawing room, an architectural space in a home * Salon (gathering), a meeting for learning or enjoyment Arts and entertainment * Salon ...

'' as "an inside joke turned into reality". It closed in July 2015 after it became too expensive to maintain. Scott followed this up in September 2015 by creating a full-size

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed convers ...

keyboard out of fourteen standard keyboards to type every standard Unicode emoji. Scott also worked for the

Daily Mirror The ''Daily Mirror'' is a British national daily tabloid. Founded in 1903, it is owned by parent company Reach plc. From 1985 to 1987, and from 1997 to 2002, the title on its masthead was simply ''The Mirror''. It had an average daily print ci ...

's UsVsTh3m, creating Flash games. UsVsTh3m shut down in 2015, but Scott maintains a few of these old games on his personal website. Other web apps Scott has created include "Evil" (a web app that revealed the phone numbers of Facebook users), "Tweleted" (which showed posts deleted from Twitter), "What's Osama bin Watchin?" (which mashed together an image of Osama bin Laden with YouTube

Internet meme An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...

s), "Parliament WikiEdits" (a Twitter bot that tweets whenever an

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

from the

Houses of Parliament The Palace of Westminster serves as the meeting place for both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the two houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Informally known as the Houses of Parliament, the Palace lies on the north bank ...

edited Wikipedia), and "Klouchebag" (a satire of the social media rankings site Klout). In December 2022, Scott appeared in two episodes of '' Christmas University Challenge'' as captain of the

University of York , mottoeng = On the threshold of wisdom , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £8.0 million , budget = £403.6 million , chancellor = Heather Melville , vice_chancellor = Charlie Jeffery , students ...

team. Scott's team beat the Durham University team 200-45, but they lost in the semi-final to the

University of Hull , mottoeng = Bearing the Torch f learning, established = 1927 – University College Hull1954 – university status , type = Public , endowment = £18.8 million (2016) , budget = £190 millio ...

155-100.

Accolades

In 2022, Tom Scott won the

Streamy Award The YouTube Streamy Awards, also known as the Streamy Awards or Streamys, are presented annually by Dick Clark Productions and Tubefilter to recognize excellence in online video, including directing, acting, producing, and writing. The formal ...

for Learning and Education.

Notes

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Scott, Tom Alumni of the University of York English computer programmers English male comedians English television presenters English YouTubers Educational and science YouTubers Living people Online edutainment People from Mansfield Year of birth missing (living people) Comedy YouTubers

Early work

YouTube career

''Amazing Places''

''Tom's Language Files''

''The Basics''

2010 UK general election

Accolades

Notes

References

External links