It’s somewhat of a slow news day, at least when it comes to the search engines - they’re all in NYC for Search Engine Strategies. While we may hear some announcements later in the week, here are three Google items worth a quick look. Techdirt is spot on with their attack on the publishing industry’s claims that Google “stealing” their content. If publishers are so worried about this, go ahead and ban Google’s

YouTube this week launched CitizenTube, a blog that focuses on politics lead by Steve Grove, YouTube’s News & Politic Editor.
What is YouTube politics? The answer to that question is as varied as the users who jump onto the platform. But it’s one thing for certain: a place where everyone, from users to candidates, has the same chance to be seen and heard. Let the best ideas win.
“Politics is made up of two words, ‘pol

Yep, they’re at it again: user posts something offensive to country on YouTube, country blocks YouTube. First it was Brazil protecting beloved soccer star Ronaldo, then Turkey in a conniption over insults aimed at its founders. Now Thailand is upset because a video insulted their king. As Search Engine Land quoted Mail & Guardian: The most offensive to Thai Buddhists was the juxtaposition of a pair of woman’s feet, the lowest

Nathan Weinberg is out today. He’ll be back tomorrow night. Till then, here’s a post he wrote yesterday. Yay…
Saw an ad on YouTube for this contest by Clean & Clear (some face cleanser company [what, I’m supposed to know makeup?]) asking YouTube users (girls only) to send in footage of their “wackiest wakeup”. Pretty much just post 15 seconds of a real or “recreated” memorable waking up mo

Pingdom, an uptime monitoring company today released a report measuring the downtimes of the 20 most visited websites in the United States in the first three months of 2007.
The report says that Google has 7 minutes of downtime so far. YouTube and Blogger each has more than 4 hours, making themselves having the highest downtimes on the list (Yahoo! has 0 min).
Big Bro’ of Downtime?

YouTube has added the “Did you mean” feature in their search engine, courtesy its parent company Google.
Google is evil? No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, err, Google is eVilla! [via Go2Web2]

Viacom has been making mistakes, forcing content offline that wasn’t actually infringing which leads him to note perceptively: “Viacom seems unable to determine what constitutes infringing content, [yet] its lawyers believe that we should have the responsibility and ability to do it for them.” If even Viacom is unable to police its own content correctly, how can they claim that it’s no problem for Google?

YouTube’s labs test site, called TestTube, has added two new features to the service.
The first, called AudioSwap, lets you replace the audio in your video with audio provided by YouTube. The audio on your video will be complete replaced by the new audio, so this is really designed for audio-free videos, like photo slideshows, nature video, or screencasts. There’s a lot of music there, most of which I’ve never heard of, but s

The YouTube blog noted that YouTube has pushed some minor updates last Wednesday night. Home Page: Now featuring Channels & Groups
Subscribe to Favorites
Category pages updates: more features and videos
More tweaking with the Channel pages: Transparency Okay, isn’t it time to improve the video qualities?
Off Topic: for some reasons I think that the guy in the video looks like Sergey Brin, doesn’t he? Well, he has to shave

We have some news and then a big ‘ole mess to bring to your attention.
First, the news. AOL has announced that it’s Advertising.com unit would manage advertising sold on the new online video site being built by NBC and News Corp.
Ok, now the mess. Google owns 5% of AOL, yet AOL is involved in what might be Google’s biggest video competitor.
Will Advertising.com now exclude the management of video campaigns outside of this new v

Remember when video site Joost stormed on to the scene, when it snagged the Viacom distribution deal out from under YouTube?
In case you’re still not sure what Joost is all about, they’ve created their own TV commercial. Oh the irony of using YouTube to share a Joost commercial. Via Adverblog.
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Google Managing Counsel Michael Kwun has a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post, an on-the-mark rebuttal of a Viacom op-ed from last weekend. Google paints Viacom as an author of the DMCA who is no longer satisfied with the law it had pushed, and defends the DMCA as the only legitimate way to protect copyright on sites like YouTube.
Google’s best point: If Viacom screwed up in figuring out which videos YouTube needed to

Google is holding lectures giving tips to political and advocacy group consultants, showing them how to better use all of Google’s services in managing their messages. According to the Los Angeles Times, Google packed 80 consultants into a lecture hall earlier this month, and conducted an hourlong seminar showing: Which types of videos resonate on YouTube
How to improve search engine rankings
Use Google AdWords to reach an already intere

The results of community voting in the first ever YouTube Awards were announced Monday, and here the winners: Most Creative - OKGo - Here It Goes Again - a music video of the band moving in sync on treadmills
Best Comedy - Smosh - Smosh Short 2: Stranded - a man falls into despair at his situation, trapped on a deserted island. The punchline is pretty damn good
Best Commentary - thewinekone - Hotness Prevails - commentary on how it’s too

A couple of quick announcements for you. As of May, every Yahoo Mail user will have unlimited email storage. Will they still delete your account if you don’t sign in for 3 months?
Meanwhile, YouTube will launch a mobile version of its web site in June. Pilgrim Partners: Buy Text Links - Buy text links and increase your site’s traffic!

YouTube has announced the winners of the YouTube 2007 Video Award. The winners of the Awards were chosen in a democratic way - by the YouTube users (I can’t guarantee that no one cheated). And the award goes to: Most Creative - Here It Goes Again by OKGo
Best Comedy - Smosh Short 2: Stranded by Smosh
Best Commentary - Hotness Prevails by thewinekone
Best Series - Ask A Ninja by digitalfilmmaker
Best Music Video - Say It’s Possible b

You know, my Google Reader link blog would be even more useful, if I could add my thoughts to each added item. Instead, I’ll share some interesting news right here! If little Zimbra can figure out how to make web applications available offline, why the heck can’t Google?
Movie Marketing Madness reports the Federal Trade Commission is about to take another look at how well the movie industry polices its own advertising. Is it time for

These are the best videos created by YouTube users in 2006. The competition is over and you can see the winners in a playlist created using SplashCast.Most Creative / People dancing on treadmills. Music: “Here It Goes Again” by OK Go.Best Comedy / Smosh Short. A man finds himself stranded on a deserted island. Smosh probably has a lot of fans.Best Commentary / Hotness Prevails. The Wine Kone complains about heat, stereotypes and heat.Best Series

Another Day, Another So-Called YouTube Killer - WebProNews
NBC and News Corp could announce as early as today a partnership geared at launching an online video site to rival YouTube. The site would feature clips from programming on both networks, allowing users to modify and share them in socially relevant ways.
DMCA takedown backlash: EFF sues Viacom over Colbert parody clip - Ars Technica
One of those clips, called “Stop the Falsiness,&#

Today is the last day for you to vote in the 2006 YouTube Video Awards and pick the top videos of last year. Go to youtube.com/ytawards to make your picks. I’m going to list all the nominees, in order of how I liked them, so you can have some fun watching these videos. My advice: try the comedy category, where the best stuff is, followed by the Adorable stuff. The Commentary is the worst category, mostly idiots talking boringly at thei

It’s official, we are definitely in the middle of a massive multi-industry war on the level of the RIAA/filesharing and other major technology wars of recent memory. Today, the war entered its third major stage, with many of the opposition joining forces to announce a YouTube competitor, coming this summer.
The chronology:
Pre-war ops: Various companies and startups enter the video sharing arena. YouTube (2/15/2005), Revver (11/2005), Br

Rumors tend to have a little more substance when they’re reported in places like the LA Times and TechCrunch. With both of these outlets reporting News Corp. and NBC are joining forces to create a video-sharing site to challenge YouTube, it’s likely going to happen.
News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they are creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modi

War Games, as it turns out, is more than just an early Matthew Broderick movie. They’re a series of events involving prominent business schools, including Harvard, MIT and the London Business School. In the past, these war games have accurately predicted events like the AOL/Google search deal, “the game of digital entertainment supremacy last year, which was iPod versus News Corp. versus Microsoft versus Vodafone or Verizon, that Ap

Damien Estreich was once like you and me, ordinary YouTube users (except that he has spent awful lot of time on YouTube). Today, the YouTube Blog announced making him an official YouTube employee as their “Community Advocate”. What he will do is to “offering personal service to the most dedicated users”. Welcome, Damien!

Deepak Thomas and Vineet Buch wrote an interesting about YouTube, titled “YouTube Case Study: Widget marketing comes of age”. They explain the key factors that assured YouTube’s success.Online video definitely existed before YouTube came into vogue. However, uploading videos, sharing and watching them was quite cumbersome. (…) Video files were too large to be e-mailed. (…) Viewers would typically need to wait for the entire video to download

Okay, I couldn’t resist. MediaPost today blogged about CBS using YouTube for their free NCAA tourney highlights. Not that there will be any highlights, since both my team and my alma mater got knocked out in the first round. Stupid upsets. Ahem. Anyway. This comes after CBS partnered with CSTV for their user-generated content contest. This new move is especially important for CBS because they were having trouble accomodating the high traffic levels on their site.

It seemed for a while there that CBS was with Viacom on the “kill YouTube” boat—but apparently not. Guess what, big, huge, YouTube-hating networks. As I just said, “Give the milk away, and make tons more money than you could from selling the milk by slapping some ads on the cow.” The new agreement will offer ad-supported highlight reels through YouTube. YouTube and CBS will split the revenues.

Associated Press reports that YouTube will hold the first video awards from its short history this week. Users will be able to vote for the best original videos uploaded in 2006 at a special YouTube channel.”YouTube community members can vote on their favorites beginning Monday and concluding on Friday. The winners, as chosen by the community, will be announced March 25. Each will be prominently featured on YouTube and receive a trophy, the desig

Reuters reports that Viacom sued the Google-owned YouTube for “more than $1 billion over unauthorized use of its programming online”. Viacom says that YouTube hosted more than 150,000 videos from its programs and these videos were watched 1.5 billion times.Viacom doesn’t think that YouTube videos increased the awareness of its shows. “YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site. Their busine

It appears Google’s finally starting to realize that if YouTube is to continue its success, they need to figure out how to protect copyright holders from video piracy.
I’m guessing losing big deals to your rivals and watching others being proactive on copyright protection, finally got Google’s attention, but apparently only just recently.
“We just reviewed that (issue) about an hour ago,” Schmidt told Reuters when asked what Google was doing to make anti-piracy technologies widely available to video owners

Do you remember when Viacom requested their videos be yanked from Google's YouTube a couple weeks ago?  Well, it looks like Viacom is now creating a relationship with the buzz-heavy "Joost" (I have a few invitations if you want one).  This turn of events must be a huge disappointment to Google since this same content [...]

We should have suspected YouTube’s chances of signing a deal with Viacom were nil, when the cable company demanded more than 100,000 video clips be removed from the Google-owned video site.
Now comes news that Viacom is about to sign a distribution deal with the up-and-coming video site Joost.com.
Viacom will provide Joost hundreds of hours of licensed programming from Viacom cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central as well as movies from Viacom-owned Paramount studios

YouTube announced last week a deal with Digital Music Group to bring that company’s archive of old TV shows to YouTube. Digital owns over 40 hours of video content, including a bunch of old TV shows and movies, mostly from the 1960s, including “I Spy”, “Gumby” and “My Favorite Martian”

If you think you’re safe behind your YouTube username, think again.
ASPnews.com is reporting Google’s YouTube has complied with subpoenas issued by the U.S. District Court in Northern California, and turned over the identities of two users who illegally uploaded entire episodes of “24″ prior to its broadcast and DVD release.
“We intend to use the information provided to pursue all available legal remedies against those who infringed our copyrights,” 20th Century Fox Television Vice President of Media Relations Chris Alexander.

Google’s compliance has ramifications beyond just the uploading of videos

Fox Studios. Almost midnight.- Unbelievable. Someone uploaded 12 episodes from our show, The Simpsons, to YouTube.- Call Google and tell them to remove the videos. They promised not to do anything evil.- But, boss, we can do more than that. We can find the bastard and send him to jail.- What do you know about him?- Everything

MySpace has announced a partnership with Audible Magic to identify and screen uploaded videos for copyrighted content.
Audible Magic uses audio fingerprinting technology to identify the audio digital signature in any video file and then looks for matches against a database of copyrighted content.
MySpace said it maintains a database of fingerprints uploaded by content owners

Yikes!
That was my response when Barbara Coll shared with me the type of search results we can expect to see, with the integration of YouTube content with Google’s search results.
The “Webmama” searched for the rather innocent “shoes” on Google and discovered content that you wouldn’t expect, and certainly wouldn’t want your kids to see.
The description reads like - well - someone who uses a lot of swear words to get their point across

Mediapost is reporting that the founders of dMarc, the radio advertising company acquired by Google last year, have resigned.
It appears the recent suggestions that Google and dMarc were not seeing eye-to-eye, on the best approach for selling radio ads, was more than just a small road-bump. Add to that, the fact that dMarc was unlikely to see the full $1.13 billion payout, as part of the acquisition structure, and you can see why Chad and Ryan Steelberg decided to take their $102 million in cash, and run.
…the two companies apparently differed over the need for a “human touch” in the sales process

Compete.com has released these graphs showing the top 10 video websites, also showing what would happen if Google Video was added to YouTube, due to Google owning YouTube, and thus claiming the traffic of both. As you can see, the Google/YouTube juggernaut owns 51% of the market:
Of the 194 million sessions among the top ten sites, 108.46 million belonged to a Google-owned site

Bloomberg is reporting that YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have registered to sell 3.23 million shares of Google stock.
Hurley and Chen, who founded YouTube in February 2005, may each sell shares worth about $326.2 million as of today’s closing price. Sequoia Capital, YouTube’s largest investor, may sell shares worth $504.4 million.

Others investors included in the filing include:

Sequoia Capital (worth $504.4 million)
Artis Capital Management LLC ($83 million)
Jawed

Over the last week, Viacom, reportedly after negotiations went nowhere, demanded YouTube remove 100,000 videos. Now, people are complaining that legitimate videos got swept up in the Great Purge, including this guy who had a video of him and some buddies discussing RSS and OPML, deleted because it occured in a restaurant that shares a name with a CBS personality.
What’s always been ridiculous with YouTube’s copyright enforcement is that the few times it even tries to enforce it, it usually deleted tons of legitimate content, with this incident being the worst

I just read an interesting MarketWatch piece on the issues Google faces with the policing of copyrighted content on YouTube. Because YouTube allows videos to be uploaded, without first being screened or approved, it’s very easy for a pulled clip to be replaced within minutes.
“It’s now a game of whack-a-mole,” said John Palfrey, a Harvard law school professor, and executive director of the school’s Berkman Center For Internet & Society.

I’m jealous that Palfrey was giving\ the opportunity to provide MarketWatch with such a cool sound-bite, but it certainly sums-up the game YouTube is playing, perfectly

You’ll see this message more often on YouTube, especially if you’re trying to watch MTV videos. Viacom demanded YouTube to remove more than 100,000 videos that use content from Viacom’s companies.”After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users.”It’s interesting that Google has a deal with Viacom that allows web publishers to display streaming video ads and video content from MTV Networks on their own sites (in a limited test, for now)

Viacom did a general search on YouTube for any term related to any of its shows, and then spammed YouTube with 100,000 DMCA take-down notices alleging that all of these clips infringed its copyright and demanding that they be censored off the Internet. YouTube made thousands of clips vanish, and sent warning notices to the people who’d posted them, warning them that they were now on a list of potential copyright infringers and telling them that repeat offenses could lead to having their accounts terminated.

Google had announced that it would be flying over parts of Australia on Australia Day, last week Friday, in order to take photos for Google Earth and Google Maps (Microsoft was doing it, too). Australians were excites, with people planning to build giant signs and write words on the ground, or just wave at the sky, in order to live on for a while in Google’s maps of the country

The BBC is reporting YouTube will shortly launch an advertising revenue share model with users who upload their own unique videos.
Following a model that has helped Revver gain popularity, YouTube founder Chad Hurley indicated the goal was to “reward creativity” of users that upload popular content.
The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.

Also coming is a new system to identify copyrighted material.
The company…was currently working on “audio fingerprinting” technologies to identify copyrighted material…

I’m guessing the identification of copyrighted material would come before the revenue share rollout

BBC reports that YouTube will allow revenue sharing, but only for uncopyrighted videos.YouTube founder Chad Hurley confirmed to the BBC that his team was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism that would “reward creativity”.The system would be rolled out in a couple of months, he said, and use a mixture of adverts, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film.The system should be launched after YouTube manages to develop the content identification software that will “scan a digital file, such as an MP3 or video, and compare the electronic fingerprints to databases of copyright material”