Damien Mulley

I’m putting together a list of business gadgets I want to review and if anyone else has suggestions, then let me know.

We can rebuild him. We have the technology.

This one might be ideal for the RoadDeaths.ie website or the Road Safety Blog. Conor O’Neill mentioned a while back that on a trip over the bank holiday weekend from Bandon to Rosslare and back he didn’t see any Gardai. From a quick poll of my friends and colleagues it was the same. Hardly anyone encountered a Garda on the roads. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could document on map routes you traveled, what times and how little Gardai you saw on the way? I note that Jonathan did get a random breath test alright.

Create a bingo type card for the kids to play in the car too. It’d probably be a boring game for them with a blank card at the end of most journeys.

(Ssssh. I’m not really here remember.)

It was predicted and now it’s happening. More and more videos are being pulled from YouTube. Comedy Central are the guys with the big lawyers this time. So the Daily Show and the Colbert Report which from this side of the Atlantic are only popular due to the likes of YouTube, are now biting the hand that fed them. Little surprise there. This seems to be the same cycle again and again.

Years back Napster was the source for music online. Go there, tell it what you wanted. “Fuck copyright” people said (as did Napster). Napster delivered whatever you wanted. It achieved critical mass and it got served. Metallica and the record companies totaled it. Only right I suppose since copyright has strong legal protection. Bless lobbying! The weakest point of YouTube is that it is centralised, just like Napster. Take out the centre and the network collapses. Now with Google being the daddy it becomes easier again since they’re all corporate these days. They don’t want to be sued out of their 4 billion in cash or whatever is their current cash stockpile. In fairness Google has managed to licence some content but not all. YouTube will never have all content and Google will never be able to licence all the worlds information. Despite their aims.

We’ll see licenced content more and more on YouTube and less and less of the unlicenced. I think Google just bought this years model when it should be considering investing in the tech that is coming down the road. They bought obsolescence. It’s the creative types that are going to route around this legal roadblock and Google should have known this. I’m sure it’ll be the premier source for music videos and the like and some licenced TV shows. Wow. It will also have all the user generated stuff sans any music or clips from movie studios or record companies. Borrrrring. Soon you just might see 12 year olds getting cease and desists for lip-synching to Shakira songs.

So where will this unlicenced content go? Well, where did the unlicenced stuff go after Napster? Kazaa and the likes. Distributed networks. They in turn got shut down or infiltrated and spammed and became less useful. Then came along Bittorrent. Even more distributed. Distributed networks and distributed content. If you want something from BitTorrent your computer will go out and take bits of a song or video from different people and glue all these pieces back together. A much harder system to shut down than anything previously.

So I’m thinking maybe that’s where video is headed. Imagine an embedded video player on your site than doesn’t get its content from YouTube but goes about the web and downloads various pieces from 100s of different sources. How many lawyers and lawyer letters to then remove that content? How many Governments and ISPs would they need to pressure and lobby? You might be able to go after 100 sites and 100 servers but 1000, 10,000, 1 million? It’s an arms race against creativity and innovation. I look forward to my embedded website video player powered by Bittorrent. If content owners were clever they might try and make a business model out of this. Instead they’ll try and block it.

Bonus link. Seems the Google deal included lots of money to buy off the copyright holders.

Howya men. I’m wondering would it be possible for two things from both of you. One would be a an OPML export of all the feeds you have in IrishBlogs.ie and planet.Journals.ie and the other thing which I think would have more importance is maybe a weekly or fortnightly update from you guys on what new blogs have been added to your public aggregators. It would be great to see who the new kids in the Irish Blog O’Sphere block are and maybe we can inform all our own readers of these new bloggers and get them some “welcome traffic”. I do understand you are both extremely busy but thought I’d throw this out there to you.

Anyone care to create some java visualiser thingymabob (technical term) that does a kind of time shift movie showing the composition of the Dáil after every election we’ve had? It would be interesting to see the increase and decrease of parties and maybe graph these against certain world and local events.