Made in Brooklyn
In just about any high school in the country you can hear any number of students bemoaning the fact that they are being forced to learn something that they’ll never use in “real life”. On the contrary, this teacher is quick to point out that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, you may be using those theorems without even knowing it.
Yes, you read that correctly. No, it’s not an exaggeration.
Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).
What is the “material support” he allegedly gave? He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about “jihad” from LeT’s leader, and — according to the FBI’s Affidavit — “a number of terrorist logos.” That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that ”based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video . . . is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT.”
Let’s be very clear about the key point: the Constitution — specifically the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment — prohibits the U.S. Government from punishing someone for the political views they express, even if those views include the advocacy of violence against the U.S. and its leaders.
Read the entire Salon article here.
I’m not exactly a Lady Gaga fan but I really have to give her credit for what she’s been able to accomplish and how she was able to accomplish it. Lady Gaga was interviewed by Google’s Marissa Mayer recently and as part of the introduction they played a little video mashup of Lady Gaga and Google using Poker Face. It’s pretty freaking awesome.
Yesterday I posted about a new content curation service called Cliq.ly. While they’re UI is pretty awesome looking, as of now there’s not many features available, although as I mentioned I’m sure more will be coming.
Today I came across a similar service called Utopic.me. Utopic.me is much more refined and is specifically tuned into your social networks and aggregating the content and hot topics your friends are currently sharing.
Currently you can connect Utopic to your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. You even have the option of blocking people and or sites from your Utopic feed.
I spoke with Jüri Kaljundi, the CEO and co-founder of Utopic, to ask him some questions about how exactly the content was aggregated. Here are his answers.
Input from your friends (or friends of friends):
- how many times an item has been posted, liked or retweeted by your friends on FB/Twitter (or favourited / liked on Youtube)
- same among your friends of friends, in case we have data about thatGlobal input statistics:
- how popular something is among all Utopic users or all Facebook/Twitter/Youtube users (accessed via their API’s)Self-learning elements inside Utopic that tune in time:
- how much you have clicked some domain objects eg. if you click more on techcrunch.com or cnn.com objects, we show more of them over time
- same for object types, eg if you click more on videos or music, we show more of that on first page over time
- on which friends items you click moreThe interesting bit is the big data we collect on backend about people’s links and interests. For example even for 500 users we have collected 2+ million links they and their friends have shared, retweeted or liked. This can open interesting possibilities in the future for trend analysis, so this is not just an UI play.
The self-learning feature is what really caught my attention. You don’t have to worry about adding feeds and or missing out, Utopic will automatically learn to detect the content you like and display it for you.
Of course with all of this data being stored by next question for Jüri was about privacy concerns. If all of this data is being stored how can we be sure that it’s safe.
We take privacy very seriously, so inside the system, only you see the stuff that has been shared to you on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc. We don’t keep really all data about each link you click, just the processed generic data of what types of things you like. For other stuff, it’s the same information that’s available over FB, Twitter, Youtube API’s anyway.
You can currently filter your content by videos, photos, music, events and movies. Here are some more screenshots below.
Great infographic showing the top brands and celebrities and the influence they wield over the different social media outlets.
Your kids kids want more Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber.
via: infographic labs
If you’ve ever wanted to be able to strip out just the audio from a YouTube video and convert it into an mp3 file to listen to or share then you definitely need to check out the Free YouTube to mp3 Converter.
I co-host a weekly talk radio show on Blog Talk Radio and there’s often times when I find myself wanting to be able to share something relevant I found on YouTube but I’ve never been able to figure out an easy way to get to just the audio so I can upload it and share it with our listeners.
You can download it from cnet here. One thing to be careful of while you’re installing it is that it does ask you whether or not you want to install some toolbars so don’t just go blindly clicking the “next” button. Once you get to the second or third screen of the install just uncheck anything you don’t want installed and your installation will continue without any of the extra add-ons.
If you’re a regular user of Chrome and occasionally watch YouTube videos you should head over and install the Better YouTube extension for Chrome.
Whenever you visit YouTube to watch a video it cleans up the entire page, enlarges the video and moves it front and center on the page.
Better Youtube will do the following:
- centers videos and automatically stretches them out to a comfortable viewing size
- centers comments and auto-hides the suggestions
- suggestions are moved to the top right corner of the video page. Click to open suggestions and click to close. (view screenshot)
- centers footer on each page
- centers title on video page
- cleans up the video page
- cleans up the home screen
- removes ads from the home screen
- removes ads and promoted videos from the search
This is the next step in the long line of “Better” Google extensions including Better Gmail and Better GReader, although I now use the Pure Reader extension for GReader which I like a lot.
UPDATE: Washington Post columnist Rob Pegoraro Tweeted that the guy who originally posted this video on YouTube was fired by NBC for releasing it. So lame NBC.
Yes, I’m quite sure that the only person left on the 2011 version of the internet that hasn’t seen this clip is probably my Mom but I’m posting it anyway.
I would claim that I’m posting it just so that I can share it with Mom and get a laugh, but the truth is she’s 76-years-old and doesn’t even own a computer and probably wouldn’t get the joke anyway. Well, that’s not totally true, she does in fact own a computer that she recently purchased. The caveat is that it’s not hooked up to the internet and she uses it as basically the world’s most expensive word processor.
If you have any complaints or comments about this post feel free to send them to kcouric a with a circle around it 1994 period com.
I just came across and started using Yoono, a really amazing social media client for literally all of your social media sites. You can see by the screenshot that not only can you include the usual Twitter and Facebook columns you can also choose to have Flickr and YouTube in there as well. And yes, it also handles multiple Twitter clients for those of you that asked.
It doesn’t stop there, you can add FriendFeed, AIM, Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Gtalk columns for your IMing needs as well.
I’ve also tried out there iPhone client which I am also impressed with so far. The major drawback that I can see in the iPhone app right now is that it seems to be fairly slow compared to other Twitter apps out there, however I’m sure this will be addressed in future upgrades.
One small feature I really like is on the left dashboard column “for lack of a better term” is that when you’re on your twitter tab it alerts you when you have any DMs or @replies come in so you don’t necessarily have to waste an entire column with one of these if you’re looking for a way to maximize your content and save some real estate.
Has anyone else out there tried Yoono yet? If so let us know what you think about it in the comments.
Memolane recently launched in private beta and has been keeping the industry’s interest piqued by using one of the oldest tricks in the book, playing hard to get. Memolane has basically been keeping a fairly low profile allowing the anticipation and buzz to speak for itself for the time being.
In September 2010 Memolane raised a $2 million funding round led by August Capital and Atomico, the venture firm run by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.
If there’s one thing that drives geeks into a frenzy it’s giving us a tool that allows us to look at our entire online persona, captured in one place as a “digital memory” of sorts. Memolane promises to, “keep your memories alive.” With so many tools at our disposal and with so many companies rising (Diaspora) and falling (FriendFeed) on what seems like a daily basis, we can often find some of our memories lost in the wake of social media devastation. Memolane is your insurance policy against that very thing.
Memolane is, in effect, saying, “just do it”. Set up your social media briefcase with all the tools you need, start connecting with them, and then forget about it and get your ass out there and start living, Memolane will take care of the rest.
Go drink a bottle of wine on a beach with a person you just met. Fly your family to Mexico to see Mayan ruins. Do a couple of Forget-Me-Shots, jump off a bridge and land on a party barge and don’t forget to check-in once you’re there. Memolane has got you covered.
Technology shouldn’t get in the way of living your life. On the contrary, it should enhance it. Memolane does just that. Memolane becomes your digital memory, creating a personal timeline (a digital memory) culled from each and every one of your social buckets.
You might be using Twitter to communicate with clients and colleagues while using Facebook to share more intimate moments with with friends and family.
Some people prefer to host their videos at Vimeo while others prefer YouTube. If you’re like me you may even use a few of the same tools yourself. I have an upgraded 80GB Picasa Web that I use to host thousands of photos of my family, namely my daughter. I also have a Flickr Pro account that I use to share more “artsy” type photographs and to follow along with some of my very talented friends that take and share great photos on Flickr.
Now let’s imagine you take a family vacation and bits and pieces of your trip are scattered all around your social network. We don’t even need to go that specific, we can take the average “week in the life” of someone online and by using Memolane, get a fascinating portrait of how all of that comes together.
During 2010, viewers watched more than 700 billion YouTube videos, and uploaded more than 13 million hours of video. These are the Creme de la Creme, the lucky few who managed a whole 16 minutes of fame thanks to YouTube.
Click after the jump, sit back, imbibe, enjoy the top 10 YouTube videos of 2010.
[Read more...]
image via: YouTube
The caveat? Carla Franklin is a full-grown adult, a graduate from Duke with an MBA from Columbia. You would think she would be less sensitive than a 12-year-old kid in Oklahoma, but apparently she’s not.
According to the Daily News, “A Manhattan judge has ordered Google to identify the cyberbully who trashed a brainy beauty on YouTube…The order gives Google 15 days to reveal any information it has on who posted the comments to YouTube videos that featured Franklin.”
If only YouTube gave you the ability to flag comments as inappropriate and remove them from your video. Oh wait, they do. I guess handling it litigiously just seemed like the easier route.
More at Gothamist
The iPhone 3G S comes already set up to easily share your videos on YouTube, but is that really the best service to share your iPhone videos on?
The videos are compressed and uploaded straight to YouTube from your phone which makes it incredibly convenient. The key step in that process is the video compression that takes place. This allows you to upload much larger videos straight to YouTube than anything you’re allowed to email from your iPhone.
Up until now I’ve mostly stored larger HD video files on my hard drive with a couple redundancy backups and smaller videos that I took with my Canon digital camera I shared on Picasa. Now, with the addition of iPhone videos in the mix I wanted to make the move to a video hosting sites to share my videos.
The bad news for Vimeo users is that sharing files remotely from the iPhone is going to be severely limited by the file size limitations put on attachments. For example, you can only email five photos at the same time. So far it’s been my experience that around one minute seems to be the cutoff point for the length of a video that you can email to Vimeo, or anywhere for that matter. And it doesn’t look like Vimeo is going to be giving the iPhone any love anytime soon.
As of now I haven’t found a video too large to upload to YouTube from the iPhone. I just published a video that was well over three minutes with no problems at all and it did it relatively quickly. It seems as though the 2GB upload limit may very well apply to the iPhone as well. If that’s the case you will have the ability to upload extremely long videos from your iPhone to YouTube.
If you’re looking to instantly publish your 3G S videos and not wait until you can upload from a computer YouTube is hands down the way to go, thanks to the built in compatibility nothing else can even come close.
This is not good news for Vimeo or Posterous for that matter (the latter being what I use to publish nearly all of my mobile content). Qik has an app in beta that will theoretically allow users to upload nearly live video limited only by the amount of space on your phone, although that is pure conjecture on my part. I have an email into the creators of Posterous and Qik to see what they have anything they’d like to add to this conversation.
At the very least I’d like to see an iPhone channel on YouTube to easily view all the mobile videos coming in from around the world. Let’s hear it iPhone 3G S early adopters, what has been your experience with sharing iPhone videos with your readers, friends and family?
Last week I posted about President-elect Barack Obama’s flickr site and how I hoped his Presidency would continue to utilize social media platforms on the web. It looks like I won’t be disappointed.
Today, President-elect Obama will record the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video — a first. The address, typically four minutes long, will be turned into a YouTube video and posted on Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, once the radio address is made public on Saturday morning.
…political observers say President-elect Obama’s innovative, online-fueled campaign will likely evolve into a new level of online communication between the public and the White House–the Internet-era version of President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” between 1933 and 1944.
Look for a White House YouTube channel to be launched shortly after Obama takes office. And for all you young folks out there that have never heard of a fireside chat, go get your learn on.
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