slamboard

…When Prince complains.

I wanted to listen to an acoustic cover of Purple Rain on YouTube today. I found out that Prince and his record company have silenced all the videos (or forced the uploaders to silence them).

One resourceful guy who had produced an instructional video on how to play the song simply put an off-site link to his audio in the description.

Over the last few years, many musical artists have reacted to the copyright infringing reality in different ways. Radiohead let people pay whatever they wanted for their recent release. Metallica sued Napster and also some universities.

Some artists that are not in the mainstream have tried adding personal extras to albums that are purchased legally.

If you NEED to listen to a Prince song, you can do a keyword search and then sort your results by the date added. Prince has to sleep sometime.

This guy isn’t asking for much…

A web site, which would have following functionalities:
1) Login
2) Any user can upload its story on net. So we need to give a full fledge functionalities like Microsoft word. All major word class languages can be used…like French, German, Chinese, Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, English, Urdu etc.

3) Any user can broadcast live video anywhere across the world. We want to give a user functionalities if user wants to broadcast to selected user from his/her own list of users or broadcast to whole world by broadcasting on our site. For example, if any function take place in India and relatives in Canada want to see live this function in Canada on our site.

4) Forum functionality: user can create there own forums. For example thread like Technology, Personnel Advice.

5) User can do any type of conferencing using our site to sleeted users in his/her own users list.

This isn’t from Craigslist. It is from odesk, a place that usually features some pretty decent jobs. This one comes from someone who has high hopes. They want to pay somebody $1500 to build them their very own YouTube. I also saw a guy who was paying $10,000 to have a MySpace clone built for him. He might get some serious takers on that, but he will be throwing his $10,000 away. Maybe he just wants to be Tom.

Even though I am not an American, I followed the Democratic primary quite closely. I was intrigued by the character and the behavior of the front runners. I was especially interested in observing how they both utilized new media like YouTube. If the contest had been about YouTube popularity, Obama would have won much sooner and with a huge margin. That difference didn’t interest me that much because it was a simple matter of demographics.

I was fascinated by the evolution of comment moderation. I feel that Team Obama had a edge with that. Both sides moderated comments on the majority of videos, with a few exceptions.

Figuring out a comment moderation policy based on the ones that get approved is quite an exercise in conjecture. Based on my observations, the moderators at HillaryClintondotcom generally only allowed positive commentary while their counterparts at BarrackObamadotcom tended to approve comments that created the appearance of an open discussion. At first, I thought they should allow comments to appear without prior approval, but I changed my mind when I looked at the level of discussion elsewhere on YouTube. I am still frustrated because it seems like the approval process on an individual video is abandoned once it is a few days old.

Hillary Clinton at this point only has six videos that have more than 100 comments. A dozen Obama videos have more than 1000 comments each. ‘A More Perfect Union’ has nearly 10,000 comments.

Now that Obama has shifted focus to the general election, it appears that there has also been a slight shift in comment moderation policy. The folks with their fingers on the approval buttons seem to be more willing to approve moronic and vicious comments because now they come predominantly from Republicans and they are just making themselves look bad.

To save my readers some time, here is an example of an critical comment that was approved by Barack Obama’s official YouTube channel:

Shame on you, Barack Obama! You just destroyed the only hope of restraining already obscene Presidential campaign costs. You’ve made it clear that you’d rather bludgeoning McCain with TV ads rather than engage him in debates or other free mediums. How can you refuse millions in public money to ask for MORE from the very supporters you acknowledge are hurting so badly??? You call that “change?” I gave money to you in the primary, but you won’t see a dime from me again.

Here is one for Hillary on her channel

Long Live Hillary Clinton! The true president of the people. I hope to be able to vote for you soon as candidate for the democratic party in 2016! I campaign all i could all i went overboard for this campaign. So Hillary I thank you for running I am sadden for you not being president in 2008. Hillary we all supporters did these for you campaign and we pledge our vote to you and we did not see the candidate we wanted but Hillary we love you!

The Obama video that drew the sample comment currently has about 580 comments, while the Hillary video has 7.

I have actually taken a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I chose my title based on my experience. People who are learning English as adults generally love idioms. This post is mostly a shout out to a school with a very cool advertising campaign. I first saw this video on something called The Pop Culture Translator. This thing is a promotional tool for the Canadian College of English Language.

I was obsessing about politics and I saw some derogatory term that I didn’t understand. I went over to the urban dictionary. None of the ‘definitions’ for my term were remotely plausible, darn kids.

I noticed that scientology is paying to advertise on urban dictionary as well as YouTube.

I am willing to sell this blog to scientology for a reasonable offer.

Tom Cruise was back on an Oprah set. The audience of the taped interview has been sworn to secrecy. I suspect that some of them will anonymously blog about it before the show airs.

Tom is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the movie in which he played a minor living of the avails of (heterosexual) prostitution and occasionally dancing in tighty-whiteys.

The image above has been transformed for the purposes of satire (I put the text version of air quotes in all by myself).

Scientology is paying for advertisement on YouTube. YouTube is owned by Google. Google has been criticized in the past for its cooperation with China. Tom Cruise pumped money into China while making Mission Impossible III. Supposedly scientology is committed to making human rights a reality around the World. That must be why their most famous member injected $10 million into a totalitarian country that is the most famous human rights abuser.

The music industry has changed a lot as the information age has come to fruition. 25 years ago, this Florida band would not be have music available to everybody on the planet free of charge on Myspace. 25 years ago, you probably would not hear about a band like Megaphone outside of their local market. I say ‘probably’ because there was always that faint hope of getting a major record deal and cashing in/selling out. The silver lining in today’s music industry is the death of the power ballad. Band’s like Megaphone are not being pressured by suits to record a sappy song that makes them feel like cutting off their own air supply. Rock on, dudes.

You can, at your own discretion, buy Megaphone music online.

This is the first American Presidential Election where YouTube is a relevant platform for discussion. That intrigued me at first, then I saw that the two people who were using it most effectively both hold their comments for moderation. After taking a moment to think about it, I realized that this was a step that both campaigns had to take. I personally had no interest in reading through the comments knowing that it was going to me a bunch of cheerleading.

Today, I noticed two things when comparing the YouTube channels of Obama and Clinton. Obama’s videos are more relevant in searches than Hillary’s. Obama has a LOT more comments.

I think the people who are responsible for approving comments for the two channels are using slightly different criteria. I do not have the time to delve deeply into the substantive differences of the comments. If anybody else wants to offer their opinion I would greatly appreciate it.

I filter for spam, but I don’t hold real comments for moderation at this time

My title is an absolutely true statement. It is also almost completely beside the point with regard to the accusation made via a YouTube video by some greasy guy.

I didn’t really want to watch the video, but I did anyway. It is pretty unconvincing. Political opponents will have to take very private joy from this. Nobody could look good associating themselves with the ploy. The MSM is so far not touching his story with a ten foot pole. I think it is possible that the perpetrators of this are apolitical people who did it for attention and money. Larry Sinclair is going to get money, at least $10,000 from a website that is piggy backing on the story with a publicity stunt.