I came across this on YouTube the other day, a video record of an installation created by Nate Harrison and called Can I Get An Amen?:
Some comment. Firstly, what a great idea! Whatever one thinks of it as a piece of art—and I love it—it’s a superb piece of historical research and exposition. OK, the narration is a bit stiff, but the presentation is well-researched, highly organized, and well considered. It’s a simple idea explored in depth and is a fabulous learning resource.
Secondly, it shows up Zero-G to be a bunch of crooks.
Thirdly, the video was not put on YouTube by Nate Harrison: at least two people have posted it there, presumably “sourced” from his own site. Ironic or what?
MP3 Player
I’ve just updated all the tracks on the MP3 player. Return visitors may care to refresh their pages now…
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YouTube
I note with interest that YouTube have launched a series of regional sites, including a UK service. Apparently there are nine regional sites now, with more to follow. According to YouTube co-founder Steve Chen the aim of local sites was to offer tailored services for each country (full story here).
We want to create features unique to certain countries, so if mobile phones are particularly popular we would introduce more mobile features.
OK. Certainly having own-language sites makes sense. However, my guess is that:
This is going to make copyright negotiations a lot easier for them. Most copyright agreements are territory-specific, and of course the Internet has completely undermined that principle. Re-territorializing content is going to make content management a lot more straightforward: this is clearly becoming a big issue for them as lawyered-up media production companies sniff around Google’s vast cash mountain…
Presumably this also represents some kind of network reconfiguration designed to take the strain off the main site. Anyone who’s tried to upload a video recently will have noticed how slow this has become: it used to take 10 minutes or so for a video to become live, but recently that time has shot up to around 12 hours. The thumbnail from my POGO video took about three days to appear!
The Wild Wild West of the electric frontier just got some more fences.
