Nationals fans boo President Bush on opening day
The guy gets no respect.
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The guy gets no respect.
News: How many views on YouTube is a good cleavage shot worth? With her characteristic irreverance, LisaNova makes fun of two of the more popular YouTubers, sxephil and Hot for Words, both of whom throw in provocative photos of female breasts (in the case of Hot for Words, it's her own) in order to get more viewers on YouTube. Below is LisaNova's spoof, followed by vids from the two people she spoofs. LisaNova's take on Marina from Hot to Words is pretty spot on. Don't get alarmed by the cleavage shots below -- they are now pretty common on YouTube and they are meant to tease--and generate more views. The tactic seems to work.
LisaNova does sxephil and Hot for Words
Hot for Words
sxephil video
News: Erick Schoneld has an insightful -- and downright fascinating -- account of his first 6 months writing for the immensely popular TechCrunch blog. One of the most important points is that the whole "blogging" phenemenon is no longer an individual amateur pursuit. Major media have all switched to blogging, and many of the most popular amateur blogs -- especially in the tech sector -- have become professionalized with paid staff. The lines between professional and amateur blogging, major media and individual content producer are getting blurry.
The article is also interesting for what it reveals about Tech Crunch. Sounds like the guys there are blogging nonstop, 24/7. I don't fall in that category, but it does sound like one of my well-known blogging colleagues here at Moritz! No wonder Tech Crunch gets close to 3 million views a month. It took me 1 year to get just 1 million.
You can find more about the project here.
Cool video, cool song. The Black Keys are fantastic -- and they allow people to embed their videos!
News: Ars Technica caught another outrageous provision in a EULA (end user license agreement), this time from the just launched Adobe Photoshop Express. Basically, the provision in the EULA by Adobe claimed to allow Adobe to re-use all of your photos posted on its site forever -- without royalties. After Ars Technica emailed Adobe, Adobe has admitted this provision is wrong and will be changed.
Analysis: My question again: who is the lawyer who drafted the EULA? That person should be fired.
News: Apparently, he's not a very good bowler.
News: Over at Tech Crunch, Michael Arrington has a characteristically insightful analysis of the social networking aggregator site called FriendFeed, which basically attempts to collect all of one's user-generated postings -- from blogs to pics to videos to twitter drivel -- and provide a convenient aggregator for all of them so that friends can easily get them all through one feed. Hence the name: FriendFeed.
Arrington points out that FriendFeed may have competition from the counter-movement to make Web 2.0 sites allows its users to move their data from one site to the next -- data portability. So people might have all their stuff disaggregated over Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, flickr, twitter, etc, but you might be able to achieve the same centralized aggregation if your material can be moved freely within all of your sites. For example, let's say I can embed everything within this blog and feed it out to all my readers. That would be convenient, although I am not sure how many people would like to see my photos!
Analysis: I just signed up for FriendFeed and hope to try it out. I loved the photo of the Social Map by Loic Le Meur on Arrington's blog.
News: This classic Wrestlemania video between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant was just posted on hulu. Still fun watching it, although it's sad to hear all the family troubles (divorce, son in trouble for serious car accident gravely injuring passenger/friend) for Hogan.
News: Karaoke is popular in Japan and, of course, elsewhere. So what happens when thousands of people record themselves karaoking and post the videos on YouTube? Well, for Japanese music, YouTube has worked out a 1-year royalty deal to pay Japan Rights Clearance to allow people to continue to make these amateur karaoke videos and share them online. A similar deal has been hashed out with JASRAC. (More)
Analysis: Good deal. This deal benefits the public and those Japanese amateurs singers or just karaoke fanatics on YouTube. YouTube is essentially acting as an intermediary and arranging the copyright deal that ratifies the user practice. I have an article coming out in October that discusses the importance of these user practices -- I will share a draft soon. The Japanese deal raises a couple questions in my mind:
1. Will a similar deal be hashed out in the United States, with the likes of ASCAP and others? (It may well be that YouTube's prior deals with some of the music labels/publishers may have covered some of this.)
2. How can YouTube afford to pay for all of this? YouTube is doing a public service right now by enabling people to do a lot of things with video without the need for users to get copyright licenses, but YouTube needs to make money somehow.
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