Tag - youtube

YouTube and Porn: partners for life?

September 2, 2011
John Koetsier
news

The problem with YouTube and porn is longstanding: it gets uploaded, YouTube finds it, YouTube cans it.

So the pornsters then upload almost-but-not-quite-but-very-close porn … sexy stuff with links and hints etc. etc. Or banned ads that broadcast TV won’t publish.

At least, that’s the way it used to be.

That’s always been the content. The stuff that people uploaded to YouTube. Not the material that YouTube itself is posting. Right?

Things seem to have changed at YouTube. Here’s what I saw this morning when I hit YouTube:

Yeah that’s an ad. A full-size ad for a new fragrance, Burberry Body.

And yeah, that’s most of the model’s body that’s visible in the ad. She’s obviously not wearing anything but the short raincoat. And leaving less to the imagination.

I call porn. Porn in advertising. YouTube: you’ve sunk to a new low. But we all know why: cold hard cash.

Unimpressive. Seriously unimpressive.

Get used to the spinning YouTube wheel of wait

February 2, 2010
John Koetsier
news

I was trying to watch a short clip on YouTube today … this one, in fact. Unfortunately, it stuttered and stumbled like an aged man on a cobblestone path.

The problem? 1080P, streamed over an internet originally designed for bare, simple, small … text.

The solution, of course, is simple: take it down a notch or two. To, perhaps, “380P,” which must be a YouTube special as I haven’t seen it on any TVs in Best Buy lately.

I have broadband, as fast as I can get in my neighborhood, but I guess I’m not quite up to snuff. I wonder how many are? Things will change, of course, as they always do.

But the last mile moves slowly.

Easily download YouTube movies via Safari

December 8, 2009
John Koetsier
news

If you’re using Safari, there’s an easy way to download YouTube videos. Open the page with the movie and press Command-Option-A, which shows the Activity window. If you’re also loading other sites, you’ll see a list of them: scroll until you find the YouTube page and click on the arrow to show details about what is being loaded.

You will certainly notice an element whose size is over 0.5MB (most of the time, over 5MB). Double-click on it (even if it is still loading), and Safari will download it. When the download is over, navigate to the file in the Finder (which will probably be called get_video) and add the extension .flv to its name. Now you can play it with VLC or with QuickTime (only if you have Perian installed).

via Easily download YouTube movies via Safari – Mac OS X Hints.

Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

October 27, 2009
John Koetsier
news

From the ReadWriteWeb story:

# Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

# Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

# Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

# Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

# “We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.

# “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”

# There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

# “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”

# It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

via Google’s Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years.

Notebook, by Evelien Lohbeck

April 26, 2009
John Koetsier
news

This is far too cool for words, but I’ll try:

It’s a reality-bending fusion of sketch, art film, computer UI, and video by a Dutch artist, Evelien Lohbeck. Maximize the video and watch it fullscreen – you’ll enjoy.

Two things that come to mind:
One: this creative genius deserves a Mac, not XP.
Two: as I noticed while scanning Evelien’s website, she needs something better than a Hotmail account.

Credit: I saw this on Neatorama.

Ruin your reputation and cost yourself millions with social media

April 10, 2009
John Koetsier
news

How can you ruin your reputation in a whole country and cost yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, with social media?

Well, you could be Bill Bob Thornton, who is pulling out of his Canadian tour dates with his band, the Boxmasters.

Why?

Well, Billy Bob (it’s difficult to take anyone with who retains that moniker as an adult seriously) had a bit of a trantrum on camera during an interview with Jian Ghomeshi, host of the CBC radio show Q. Ghomeshi mentioned – horror of horrors – that BB had a previous career in acting. BB’s response was to reprise Joaquin Phoenix’s disastrous Letterman appearance, answering “I don’t know” to questions as obvious as how long the band has been together, and going on a long monologue about a toy building magazine he read as a child when asked what his musical preferences were.

Watch the whole trainwreck interview here:

After bad-mouthing Canadian audiences – and just clearly being a petulant jerk during the interview – Billy Bob was booed at his first Canadian show.

Now, he’s pulled out of all the remaining Canadian dates:

Billy Bob Thornton — who hit a sour note during a disastrous CBC radio interview Wednesday — has cancelled his band’s remaining Canadian shows.

Whatever the impact of those shows, and whatever the impact of BB’s performance on Canadian fans and audiences … the bigger impact is probably south of the border, where the YouTube video is also getting major attention. Many of the comments on the Q blog are obviously from Americans. The YouTube video already has almost 1.2 million views.

Way to go, Billy. Life is lived in public these days … and a moment’s bad temper can color people’s impressions of you for a long time.

Just ask Michael Richards, AKA Cosmo Kramer.

Zappo's: on the Cluetrain

January 15, 2009
John Koetsier
news

I absolutely love the way Zappo’s reminds their employees about corporate guidelines.

Sensible rule
First of all, they have a sensible rule: don’t reply to all! This is one of those Obviously Good Ideas™ that few follow … mostly for the purposes of CingYA in case of disaster, and appearing to look busy to lots of people. But in a high-trust and high-effectiveness work environment, the best email approach is only to reply to the people who absolutely need the reply.

The others, of course, need to trust that those who need to act are in fact acting on whatever information the email contained. The benefit is that they don’t have their inbox clogged with nice-to-know but useless information, and their productivity goes up.

Creative, fun implementation
However, most companies (even the ones with good rules) have nasty or annoying ways of reminding employees about the do’s and don’ts. Memos, personal chats with managers, staff meetings, etc. All of them are boring, annoying, can be insulting, and … ineffective. They’re ineffective because they’re not memorable.

Well, how’s this for memorability:

I tell you – I’d remember it. I’d probably not Reply to All ever again. Others in the office probably wouldn’t either. And, because of the fun spirit … I wouldn’t even be annoyed or insulted.

You have to have an amazing corporate culture to have earned the right to do this sort of thing, though … and especially to post it on YouTube.

But when you do … the benefits obviously spill out and support your entire branding and marketing efforts.

Feedyes? Feedno! Finding a working YouTube RSS Generator

October 25, 2007
John Koetsier
news

I’m trying to create a feed for a page that has no feeds:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=serious+games&search=SearchFeedYes is supposed to be able to do that … but annoyingly, the site continually has technical errors that prevent me from making a feed. First of all, it doesn’t show steps 3 and 4 … after showing steps 1 and 2. And secondly, after following the instructions in step 2, it tells me that the URL is invalid … after just using it to create a perfectly good list of recent videos.Arggh …Dapper has issues as well. In fact, in total, I probably spent about 45 minutes fooling around with FeedYes and Dapper before finding a service that actually worked …The best I found for YouTube RSS is actually YouTube RSS Generator, which looks decided low-tech but gave me a perfectly functioning feed in about 25 seconds.