Recent posts in my YouTube Category
September 7, 2010
A bloke walks into a pub and says "That woman who put that cat in a bin..."
Being caught up in the bubble of hyper-connected media professionals means it is sometimes easy to get very over-excited about the level of internet activity and literacy, and the digital future for newspapers, and forget about the strengths of the 'legacy' print product. And I don't just mean that print advertising still pulls in a big chunk of the money. But overhearing things in pubs can sometimes be a good antidote.
August 7, 2009
Does the embedded video deal lead to papers burying bad BBC news online?
The deal to share BBC video content with leading national newspapers websites, including that belonging to The Guardian where I work, moves us into some murky uncharted waters. Joanna Geary of The Times, who are not taking the video content, said that: "I’ve got this horrible feeling that the BBC deal proves that many articles produced by newspapers provide little or no uniqueness to help distinguish them in a flooded market." It is early days for the deal, but it...
November 24, 2008
Local online news video - where do we go from here?
With the announcement of the BBC Trust decision not to allow the BBC to go into English ultra-local news journalism, a huge amount of attention has fallen on the existing regional press. On balance, I think it was probably just about right not to allow the BBC to make more video content available in this area at this time, but, claims that this would have lead to a stifling of commercial content and innovation look pretty hollow if you are...
August 21, 2008
Celebrate the Olympic handover to London on Flickr and YouTube
In just a few days time, at the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, China will hand over the Olympic flag to London. I'm quite relieved it is just the flag actually, because I had this terrible mental image of them handing over the Olympic Flame, and then Boris having to keep it burning in his draw in City Hall for the next four years. He'll be receiving the flag though, from the Mayor of Beijing, in a handover ceremony...
March 14, 2008
The long (monkey) tail of YouTube
I got an email alert from YouTube a while back, informing me that someone had left a comment on my YouTube clip of a monkey teasing a pig which we saw in Salzburg Zoo last winter. XXRevolveXX had said: "that monkey needs a life" I was just in the middle of composing some witty retort about pots / kettles and the fact that XXRevolveXX had frittered away a minute watching the monkey with no life, when I noticed something I...
January 8, 2008
Gene Marks is dangerously wrong about "Tech 'solutions' your small biz can't use"
A couple of days ago via the extremely useful Sphinn I was directed to an article on MSNBC by Gene Marks - "Tech 'Solutions' Your Small Biz Can't Use". In amongst it he lists RSS, blogs, SEO and Web 2.0 as tech that have no uses for the small business. Once I'd spluttered out my coffee and started hammering my outraged response, I realised it was a great bit of linkbait designed to get lots of people frothing at the...
October 3, 2007
The London freesheets and the web - Part 6: Video
I've been looking at how the free newspapers given to commuters in London use interactivity and content from the web and their users in their print editions for things like voting, TXTing in and music reviews. The focus of today's post is on how they use video content. Even a couple of years ago the idea of newspapers incorporating video content belonged to the medium-future, when we have electronic paper and ubiquitous network connectivity. However, we now have initiatives like...
June 13, 2007
Google search results promoting YouTube's Premier League copyright infringement
There was a bit of fuss last week when Ask announced a more integrated search results interface, following on from a similar announcement a while back that Google were going to more tightly integrate their niche search products like image search and blog search. One of the problems for Google is that the tighter integration of video results into their main search engine makes it harder for them to plead ignorance about copyright issues. Apart from the issue of a...
March 8, 2007
Turkish YouTube ban unleashes the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast within
Yesterday the internet was buzzing with the news that a judicial decision in Turkey had blocked access to YouTube for users in that country. Most people looked at it as part of an ongoing narrative of states trying to control what could be published on the internet, but I found the whole Greece / Turkey subtext of the story to be the most interesting part. It seems that the offending videos on YouTube were user-generated content made by Greeks...
November 28, 2006
Video blogging isn't safe for work for me
Words are dead. The future lies instead in sound and pictures. And that's bad news for blogs like mine which rely on words. People can't be bothered to read words any more, not when they can be spoonfed moving images with an accompanying soundtrack instead. Could be a music video, could be a film trailer, could be a TV snippet, could be two spotty teenagers shouting into a webcam in their bedroom. Whatever the content, sitting back and soaking in...
October 1, 2006
YouTube is a neo-Nazi website according to The Independent
Regular readers will be aware that I loathe rubbish journalism which features the internet. This weekend the article that most roused my ire was a piece in The Independent by Tony Paterson headlined "German neo-Nazis to launch their own video news channel". Maybe it is my new setting in Austria that particularly made this grab my attention. Essentially the story is that the German right-wing NDP party are producing news bulletins to promote their point of view, claiming that they...
August 16, 2006
New media pensioner and president in the old media
Yesterday's old media seemed to have a surfeit of "drop the dead donkey" style stories about the internet - you know the type. YouTube's geriatric1927 made the transition from viral internet success to print marvel in a Daily Mail article by Nick Craven and Liz Hill: On paper. he makes an unlikely celebrity for the 21st Century But on the computer screen, Peter the pensioner is the latest big thing. The Daily Mail even printed an appeal for Peter to...
June 2, 2006
Is the BBC's World Cup blog the new Slashdot for football sites?
One of the disadvantages/advantages of living in Greece is that I don't get to watch England friendlies anymore (delete according to whether we are turning over Hungary or being humiliated by Australia) which means I didn't get to see Peter Crouch's inexplicable robot dancing this week. I did though get to witness the aftershocks on the internet. The BBC Sport World Cup Blog linked through to a site that had some video of Peter Crouch dancing, and promoted it on...