Daily Links for August 23, 2007

• Silicon nanoparticles enhance performance of solar cells
  Placing a film of silicon nanoparticles onto a silicon solar cell can boost power, reduce heat and prolong the cell’s life, researchers report. I love solar power news like this.
  (tags: Energy)
• Crash destroys rocket ahead of X Prize contest - space - 22 August 2007 - New Scientist Space
  One of Armadillo Aerospace’s vehicles crashed and burst into flames. The vehicle went up on its own and had to be shut down, and then crashed to the ground. Sounds like it was going well on its own, so it could be a success.
  (tags: Space)
• Google launches first YouTube ads - Telegraph
  YouTube is set to show advertising for the first time in videos. Not really news. And we’ll find out if it works well or not soon enough
  (tags: Youtube Video Google)

AppleWatch Live: Episode 4

Tonight at 7 AppleWatch Live aired for the fourth time and lasted for 11 minutes. So go take a listen and post comments here about it, and what you want to see in the future.Download as MP3 (4.6MB / 11.2 minutes)Episode 4 covered the iPhone, iPhone updates, Youtube coming to iPhone, Bluetooth headset, the new [...]

More: continued here

YouTube Just Took Down Viacom Videos

YouTube, owned by Google, has just taken down the 100,000+ videos that Viacom marked as infringing their copyrights. I will now work to find all important Colbert Report and Daily Show clips from other video services. This also makes me think of a better system for VidMirror that would be able to determine if a video is down or not. I will let you know if I make any progress on that.

Videos to find or upload:
submit a new video to find

Videos found:
Internet is a Series of Tubes (Net Neutrality) - Daily Show
Stephen Colbert Explains ATT/Cingular - Colbert Report

Have any others that should be added to the list? Find a video somewhere other than YouTube? Comment or use the contact form. I love that the Cingular video is still on Google Video.

Google Buys Youtube

It appears that Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. I find that this follows along with their new mission for engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead make existing ones work together better. It is a sign that they are leaning away from a purely engineer driven approach, and leaning toward acquiring services that have done a better job than they have been able to do at reinventing the wheel.

YouTube will “remain an independent brand, in order to preserve its community” (Nathan). Google Video will still remain, but YouTube will get Google’s infrastructure and expertise. They’ll have smarter people helping them improve algorithms and features. Nathan has some great coverage of the conference call, and a summary of coverage around the web.

Along with the recent Google deals with Warner and Sony BMG, this means that Google and YouTube will have the means to monetize and legitimize their content.

Sources: spread throughout this post

Death of YouTube?

According to a Forbes article, YouTube has begun accepting pay-for-placement. The promotion of Paris Hilton’s new album on their homepage is an example of this. Now that YouTube accepts payment for promoting videos to the homepage and creating custom channels and profiles, can they be trusted? How long will it be until they decide to accept payment for top placement in search results? And once that happens is the site no longer run by the community?

What do you think? Am I right? Am I wrong? Is YouTube no worse than other companies trying to capitalize on the social networking buzz? Is money more important than an altruistic need to serve the public? Are video sharing sites poisoning the minds of the youth and offering no service of substantial substance? Or do I just like using big words?

Source: Forbes

YouTube and Official Videos

I just noticed this video on YouTube that says it is provided by Atlantic Records. You can see their member profile here. It’s nice to see them getting official content, and it’s a creative use of the medium. This could be tied to their new Premium Content Provider Program that lets companies submit professionally-produced videos.

Do you think this goes against the spirit of a site built off of user-generated content? Or is this a way to combat the use of the service for displaying content that the submitter doesn’t own? Sound off in the comments.

YouTube

I first heard about YouTube a few days ago when it was announced that they received funding, but I never really looked at it until coolz0r posted one of the videos on his blog. YouTube does for video what Flickr did for photos. What differentiates YouTube from Google Video is their focus on building a social network. You can rate videos, you can view other videos by the same users, you can contact the video’s submitter, you can leave comments, and you can see who has been linking to a given video (uses a blog ping type system). YouTube has been around for a while, but I only now found it.

Now if only the videos weren’t mostly from teenagers. It just feels wrong to watch their videos, even though there is no inappropriate content. Dancing like that should be illegal.