Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post spent two weeks living inside the YouTube world — and she discovered, instead of it being a cesspool of low culture as she has presumed, it is a place of a dynamic aesthetic and endless potential — at least as represented by its most inventive manifestations.

Yet she still feels the need to offer some “guiding principles” for the artists of this new online universe. Here’s a sample of her advice:

Resist facile irony.

In other words, snark is easy, satire is hard. YouTube may be the ultimate postmodern medium, and as such it falls prey to postmodernism’s greatest failing: pastiche. For every attitudinal teenager proving how well he can imitate “Jackass,” YouTube has also allowed — albeit in smaller numbers — gifted artists-slash-essayists’ work that both exploits the medium and engages the world. Take Ze Frank, whose site is a veritable trove of games, Web casts and dada-esque ephemera that comment on everything from politics to online culture to Frank’s own peripatetic travel schedule.

Other principles include “Your limitations are your strengths” and “Indulge the arcane.”

Her ability to recognize the best and the worst tendencies of such a new medium makes her analysis fresh and worthwhile. But the best part is her selection of what might be called YouTube’s greatest hits. Just when you think you’ve been e-mailed them all …