Ted.com is the website of the long-running Technology, Entertainment & Design conference which since 1984 has brought together many of the world’s leading thinkers and intellectuals, and challenged them to give the talk of their lives in just under 20 minutes…
For many years the conference was an invite only affair, and even then tickets cost around $6,000, meaning that the general public had very little benefit from this remarkable series of talks and presentations.
I have just read a very interesting post on the Google vs Viacom lawsuit on Mashable.com (a leading social networking blog).
(N.B. If you are new to the topic check the previous post on this blog for background info).
The Mashable article is very condemning of Viacom in making their requests for logging history, and also critical of the US judge who ruled in their favour on the action, mainly out of anger that Youtube users might now be at risk from facing potential (and probably successful) copyright violation lawsuits from Viacom.
So Viacom’s lengthy court case with Google over Youtube copyright infringement is finally coming to a head. A US court has ruled that Google will have to hand over the entire Youtube logging database, approximately 12 terabytes of files, after Viacom complained about roughly 160,000 Youtube clips of their shows (total views; over 1.5bn), posted in violation of copyright laws.
The log files contain details of all userIDs and IP addresses for every single video view on record to date, which understandably Google is not keen to share with Viacom…
Slideshare.net is looking like a real winner in the online media sharing market. Their Youtube-style content portal is designed for hosting and sharing slideshows, presentations, and ’slidecasts’, and is currently the leading site in this sector. I had a little explore of the various features on offer to see just how good it really is…
The first thing new visitors will recognise is the layout - the homepage features a search bar, a tag cloud, and then selections of most popular, most downloaded, and recently added shows. Further down there are links to users and groups (like Youtube, Slideshare encourages users to register into the community - though you can use the site without doing this).
This week has seen some interesting developments concerning two of Web 2.0’s biggest stars; YouTube and MySpace. While MySpace unveiled its rival to Facebook’s Platform system (more on this later), YouTube announced the launch of its Partner Programme in the UK. The scheme will enable users to earn money from their videos by becoming ‘YouTube Partners’, qualifying them for a share of revenue generated from advertising that runs alongside their videos, proportional to the popularity of their clips.
