Entries tagged 'YouTube'
Monday, July 14th, 2008
What Did They Really Say?
This looks like it could be one of the most useful political tools to come about in many years: Google has announced that they’ve automatically transcribed and indexed every video posted by a politician on YouTube.
They’ve even made this sexy little embeddable gadget:
From this, one can query how many times Obama or McCain have spoken about a topic, like education, or said something about taxes. I can’t wait to see bloggers start putting this to use soon.
• Email This PostFriday, July 4th, 2008
Pushing Back on a Rediculous Privacy Ruling
Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton ruled that Google should turn over its viewing logs to Viacom Inc. as part of Viacom’s copyright-infringement case against YouTube.
According to the Associated Press, the database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer’s unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer’s computer.
This is clearly an overreaching grab by Viacom in their effort to show that copyrighted clips are viewed more than Otters Holding Hands in order squeeze $1 billion out of Google, YouTube’s parent company.
If this ruling stands, the question is what comes next? A court forcing Google to turn over their entire database of search records to show that people search for the copyrighted term “playboy” when they’re just looking for plain-old porn?
The best reaction I’ve read so far to this ruling, however, has to be a suggestion that Google hand over the 12 terabytes of logs in paper form, just for kicks.
For the record, those logs would be equivalent to all of the printed books in the Library of Congress.
That’s a whole lot of document revew for some recent law-school grads. Have fun with that.
• Email This PostTuesday, June 17th, 2008
The Gays Are Getting Married
Today marks the first full day that the state of California no longer actively discriminates against gays and lesbians and allows them to enjoy the full rights and benefits of marriage.
Hats off to the groups that have been fighting for this recognition for years. Let’s hope the tide has finally turned and we can finally look at people in love as people in love–regardless of their sexuality.
In honor of the day, I ran across this YouTube gem:
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Thursday, June 12th, 2008
Why I’m Voting Republican
Despite all I have said here on this blog about the great Senator from Illinois, I found this video on YouTube today that perfectly captures why I’m voting Republican this November.
Just kidding. 