AP writer Jake Coyle took the time to draft a good list of the Top 10 YouTube videos of 2006. The story appears all over the place.

There is just one problem though. The story doesn’t so much as link to the chosen videos, much less play the videos within the story itself. The experience is actually frustrating. I’m given a seemingly great list but no way to watch the videos without going on some sort of wild goose chase to find them.

I’m on the Internet reading your story. Show me the videos.
Anyway, as a public service, here are embedded versions of his top 5 videos (or concepts in some case).

(1) “The face of YouTube — The cute, bedroom confessions of Lonelygirl15 remain the site’s quintessential expression.”

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(2) “Network wake-up call — ‘Saturday Night Live’s’ “Lazy Sunday” mock-rap sketch was, in some ways, what started the revolution.”

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(3) “Political fallout — YouTube, like the Internet in general, has made it a specialty to reveal the gaffes and mistakes of the establishment.”

[gv data="r90z0PMnKwI" width="425" height="350"][/gv]

(4) “Floundering founders — When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in October, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen posted a goofy, unrehearsed video…”

I couldn’t find this one.

(5) “OK, stop — MTV turned 25 this year, but it became clear a long time ago that its programming doesn’t have room for music videos anymore. YouTube’s expanse is endless, of course, and the site turned a little-known power pop group into the music video sensation of the year. OK Go’s video for “Here it Goes Again” was made in one long take with the amateurish creativity that YouTube specializes in. ”

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[Via MediaShift]

CNBC relaunched its website a few days ago after being offline for six months due the expiration of its deal with Microsoft. Here is a quick look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the redesigned site.

The Good

(1) According to Techcrunch, the site will have between three and eight hours of fresh video content available each day. A web show called “Market in a Minute” will summarize market happenings twice per hour. Sounds good.

(2) Most CNBC anchors appear to have their own blogs on the site that are being updated nearly every day (see Phil LeBeau’s blog here). You can search for tags, sectors and companies across blogs. This makes it easy to access all blog entries that mention, say, Microsoft.

(3) CNBC Plus will allow users to watch live CNBC TV content from their computers for $9.99 a month. That is not that interesting to me, but for business users this might be a good option.

(4) You can easily save/submit CNBC content to Digg and del.icio.us (see right). I’m not sure the content here lends itself to those sites, but it is worth a try.

The Bad

(1) The design of the site feels heavy and, well, old. The whole thing has that Microsoft/MSNBC.com feel to it. The site is also very slow.

(2) Given the video focus, it is disappointing that the only option is to play Windows Media Player versions of the videos. If you are only going to offer one video option, it seems like it should be Flash given the success of YouTube and others with that format.

(3) There is no way to comment on staff blog entries (or any other site content), although they do have a weird feature where they invite you to sent them comments via regular email. As far as I can tell there isn’t any really any user generated content on the site.

(4) I don’t see anything in the company profile area (Microsoft example) that would cause people to switch from sites like Yahoo Finance (example) and Google Finance (example).

The Ugly

(1) The search is completely broken. You can see the results for a sitewide search for “Autozone” on the right (which is that there are nor results). This despite the fact that there is clearly an Autozone story on the site homepage. Searches for Microsoft also produced no results.

(2) The Video section has a promising Most Viewed feature that presumably allows you to access the most popular videos. Unfortunately, when you click on this link it says there are no results. So I guess that is broken as well.

Personal Democracy is running a series this week on the role technology played in the 2006 elections and what role it will play in future elections. They asked a group of “technologists, politicos, bloggers, and journalists” to send in their take on the issue.

The best take I’ve seen so far (including my own) was from David Weinberger, a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and coauthor of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

“The old quip about AI applies: As AI succeeds, it’s no longer counted as AI. In this cycle, what was groundbreaking two years ago now seems normal. Bloggers help shape the discussion. Sites aggregate info about who’s raising money from whom. Candidates have blogs. Campaigns post YouTubes. They use the Internet to organize feet on the street. They raise money through email. And, they avoid talking about the details of their proposals by mumbling the URL of their Web site. The Internet transformation is well under way.”

You can read the first set of submissions here (mine is in this batch) and the second set here.

Idealog reports that three or our top 10 political videos are no longer active on YouTube. Our modest top 10 list is a sad casualty of the inevitble legal chess match brought on by Google's purchase of YouTube. All of us at The Bivings Group will observe a moment of silence on Monday on respectful memory of Jon Stewart's Series of Tubes segment.

So Hotsoup, the much hyped political social networking site, launched quietly a few days back.  I hope for the sake of founders Mark McKinnon, Joe Lockhart  Matthew Dowd and Carter Eskew that this is an alpha release or something because it is a mess. 

I've been working in web development for ten years now and after wasting spending thirty minutes going through Hotsoup I still don't really understand what they are trying to accomplish here.  The site just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Here are a few of the more glaring problems I saw: (more…)

Two pieces of news just sort of jumped out at me today:

(1) Dick DeVos, who is running for Governer in Michigan, just announced the winner of a video contest they were running on their website.  The DeVos campaign invited site visitors to make their own political ads in support of DeVos, giving a video iPod to the winner.

Fantastic idea.  If you watch the videos you'll see the power and weakness of this concept.  The quality is all over the board.

(2) Business Week online has a great story on the use of Web 2.0 by European political candidates.  Most interestingly, British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has a video blog. 

In the wake of the purchase of YouTube by Google, there has been a lot of discussion about online video and the various companies trying to gain market share in the space.  When you look at the various players, you’ll see a lot of different approaches.  Some focus on viral video.  Some focus on sharing videos with friends and family.  Some focus on serving the needs of video bloggers.

As someone who builds websites for a living, I’ve been looking at these services the last few weeks.  What I’ve been contemplating is using these services to host videos for some of our clients. 

We’ve built custom Flash video players for a number of clients and we will continue to do so for those who want or need a custom player.  But for clients that produce four of five videos a year, why not host the video using one of these third party services? 

You save time since all the services automatically convert videos into FLV (Flash) format for you.  You save bandwidth costs by hosting through a third party.  You also get a lot of value-added features that you aren’t going to have the resources to build into a custom player yourself.

We launched a website for the Washington Area Women’s Foundation earlier this week that includes a few videos.  After looking at four or five options, I ended up hosting the videos through blip.tv.  Here’s what I like about the service and why I chose it.

(more…)

Update: The folks at Blip Tv contacted me and corrected my statement that YouTube was the first company to allow bloggers to imbed third party video content on their own sites. Blip TV launched that feature one month before YouTube. My original post follows.

As far as I know, YouTube was the first video service to allow users to copy a bit of code and play videos on their own blog or website.  It was a brilliant move and is a big reason Youtube has been so successful. 

Lately, some of the video services have been innovating in terms of the features and functionality they are including in their embeddable video player.  So following are my ranking of the embeddable video players for some of the major video sites, with the best listed first. 

(1) Netscape Player

Best features by far.  Allows you to easily grab the video for posting on your blog in different sizes and shows the number of votes and comments the video has attracted on Netscape.  Two small gripes: it doesn’t work in Netvibes and I find the player design a little too colorful.  For these embeddable video players I prefer extremely subtle designs that look good on every blog/website.  Overall, a great job by Jason Calcanis and the Netscape team. 

(more…)

Ever now and then something hits the Internet and spreads like wildfire.  Below are four such phenomena I've come across recently that I figured I'd share.

(1) Million Dollar Homepage

On August 26, 2005, English college student Alex Tew launched the Million Dollar Homepage as a way to fund his education. The site's homepage consists of a 1000 by 1000 pixel grid (one million pixels). Tew sold mini banner ads on his homepage for $1 per pixel with a minimum buy of a ten by ten pixel block (100 pixels = $100). The site quickly became an Internet phenomenon, getting passed around from person to person. On January 1, 2006, Tew sold the last of his site's pixels on eBay. The site grossed a total of $1,037,100.

View the Wikipedia entry for the full story on the Million Dollar Homepage.

(more…)

By now, we all know about the popularity of YouTube and the dramatic effect the site has had on video creation and sharing.  However, despite its popularity and dominating position as the Web's most popular user-generated video site, it seems to me that YouTube could be in danger of going under.  "That's preposterous", you say.  "Millions of people are viewing the site on a daily basis! How could you  be so stupid to say that it's going under?"  Well, while we have plenty of reports citing the millions of page views and millions of videos generated on YouTube, what we don't have are reports citing YouTube's millions of dollars in profits.  And that is because YouTube profits are nonexistent, despite all the hype surrounding the website.  If the site fails to produce an effective business model complete with actual profits, as opposed to losses, in the near future, this ground-breaking Web dominator could be in serious trouble.

(more…)

The George Allen campaign has launched a blog.  Anything they do online is just more material for Wonkette at this point…Scott Baradell from Idea Grove has a great post on 101 Ways to Brew Up a Great Idea.  Going to Vegas is by far the best suggestion…Joe Lieberman's campaign has quietly disabled comments on their blog.  I can't blame them - the comments area was a complete train wreck…This video of some dude who has taken a picture of himself for six straight years is pretty cool.  The New Numa video is not - stick to the original.

We've posted frequently about the impact video sharing sites like YouTube are having on politics. Sometimes it's better to show than to tell. So here are ten political themed videos that have made the rounds on YouTube. They demonstrate the power YouTube can have in catching politicians in “oops” moments and spreading funny/weird videos that appear on CSPAN and Comedy Central.

(10) Senate Robert Byrd sleeping through a Harry Reid speech….

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(more…)

I’m not sure how I missed this, but the Washington Post recently launched a political ad campaign database called Mixed Messages. It looks like the Post will be trying to catalogue all the political ads produced by the various candidates/national committees this cycle.

They’ve done a really nice job with this. The database allows you to view ads based on all sorts of criteria such as state, tone, issue, candidate, etc. (see below). Only thing I would like to see is a little code that would allow web developers/bloggers to imbed the videos on their own site. And maybe a better interface for actually playing the videos. Of course, I also don’t have to pay the Post’s bandwidth bill.

Via holavaty.com.

> There is an interesting piece on BusinessWeek.com (via Slashdot ) that talks about the Dell Battery Recall program and how the blogosphere “kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.”

As mentioned in the BusinessWeek.com article, the blogosphere’s ability to continue to provide examples and data raised the profile of this issue into something that Dell needed to accept and address openly. Kudos to them for dealing with it as they have - maybe they should take a page out of Apple’s playbook (and Rita’s post )  in regards to positioning and ease of use.

Last night in a fit of insomnia I was scanning Slashdot for the latest and greatest - and I stumbled on a link to this article from the Washington Post. Michael De Kort, a (now ex-) Lockheed Martin engineer working on a project for the U.S. Coast Guard identified “several critical safety and security problems” within the project and tried to bring attention to them by going through the traditional processes for dealing with such issues. According to the article, he went through proper channels to voice his complaint - including “Lockheed Martin ethics investigations, engineering management reviews, quality reviews, propram management reviews” and also working through “the chain to Lockheed Martin corporate legal, to the CEO Bob Stevens, and to the Board of Directors”. He also contacted  the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Homeland Security which is currently conducting a review and reached out to Representative Peter King (R- NY), Chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight Committee. I highlight the steps he took because it seems that he did what any good employee would do in this situation; use appropriate channels to voice concerns about a project.

What he did next is interesting to me - especially in light of the BusinessWeek article I mentioned at the top of this post. He made a video of his complaint and posted it on YouTube. The original video is below

If you cannot watch the video or would rather read a transcript of his video, Slashdot user Pushnell
has helpfully created one.

At 1:09pm this afternoon, his YouTube video has received approximately 41579 views. At 5:15 pm his video had received 47186 views. As of last night the Washington Post was reporting over 8,000 views. As of this afternoon there are over 25 stories about him and his story, and they are on Time.com / CNet.com / CBS news and a host of others. Direct link to my Google News search is here. 

It seems that his story has legs and e has created a profile on Slashdot to respond to comments about his video.

I wonder what appreciable results his posting on YouTube will bring about. Will it raise the profile of this issue to the point that both Lockheed Martin and the Coast Guard need to publicly address this issue? Will the blogosphere embrace this despite having one central source for this story (his YouTube video) as opposed to the many others found on the Dell Laptop Battery incident (YouTube videos, blog postings from many different users, etc)?

Finally, what does this mean for other whistleblowers in the future? Has he set a precedent for them? Instead of a whistleblower pitching his or her story to the traditional media, will YouTube and the blogosphere be the go to outlets? Mr. De Kort lends a human face to the problem that might otherwise be buried in a lawsuit somewhere and thanks to wonders of the archiveal nature of the Internet (and the series of tubes that make it up) his story will always be found in video or text format regardless of the merit of his story. Currently, he is unemployed, and according to the Washington Post,  Lockheed Martin
said that “the video did not influence the decision to lay off De Kort and that he had had been notified earlier this year that he would be out of a job.” Who knows what the details are surrounding his dismissal, but I wonder if his actions can also get him a new job.

Finally, a hypothetical scenario to ponder that could affect us directly in our day-to-day lives. Are we far off from the days when some anonymous ‘hacker’ will decide to not only highlight the security flaw in an operating system but also provide a screencast showing your average user how to exploit this flaw?

I’m watching this story with interest - leave me your thoughts in the comments below.

Rolling Stone has a story on their blog about YouTube's role in exposing and spreading the now infamous George Allen Listening Tour video.  Here's a quote from the article:

There’s a paradigm shift under way and politicians like Allen, and to a lesser extent Joe Lieberman and Barbara Boxer, are learning it the hard way. The barriers to video broadcast are now gone. So an opposing campaign no longer has to rely on a local news station or CNN or CSPAN to run video of a gaffe. Any dolt with a handicam now can capture the unscripted reality of a candidate and disseminate it worldwide.

If it generates enough buzz in the blogosphere, the cable networks will even pick it up, as happened almost immediately with Allen’s monkeyboy dig.

All that sounds great and true.  There is only one problem: didn't the Washington Post break the story after the Webb campaign released the video to reporters?  I think this was more a case of the blogosphere picking up on a mainstream press story than vice versa.

Regardless, I think it's pretty much guaranteed that more citizen journalist produced videos will pop up in the next few months and potentially impact the 2006 election.