Results tagged “youtube”

Imagine if half a million people marched on Washington, collectively broke federal law, did it in plain sight of the world's leaders and traditional media, and yet we all barely noticed? What if political leaders didn't even see it as a political act, but instead as some sort of funny stunt?

Over the last half-decade, it's become obvious that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have chosen to ignore copyright law and to upload copyrighted material to sites like YouTube without getting permission to do so. Technically, it's illegal. Practically, it doesn't matter. Politically, it's fascinating.

In the past, when an enormous number of people chose to willfully and blatantly disobey laws that they considered unjust, we called it an act of civil disobedience. We understood the social significant of their collective demonstration, and as a society started to reckon with the implications of their actions.Today, we instead see it as an odd quirk of online culture, and outside of some eggheaded discussions about the future of intellectual property law, we largely see it as unremarkable. And that's true despite the fact that traditional political demonstrations in the context of political activism are increasingly ineffective and anachronistic.

Putting the "Party" Back in Political Party

The open culture movement that's expressed through uploading content and remixes crosses conventional political lines and eludes identification with any traditional political affiliation. The sheer number of participants dwarfs movements (or perceived movements) that have attracted much more attention, such as the tea party efforts. Any given march on Washington these days ends not in policy reform or change in any enacted laws, but in pointless and contentious debate over how many people showed up and whether they represent an actual movement. But part of the reason this new online form of political demonstration is so effective in recruiting active participants is because it's made participation as easy as taking part in the existing social networks that so many of us contribute to every day.

For generations, political activists have said that the prerequisite to getting significant participation in a movement is to make the political personal. And nothing is more personal than the entertainment and media we consume and create on our social networks every day. Remixing is an increasingly political act.

So what happens when vast numbers of social networking citizens find another law that they consider irrelevant? What if it's something more contentious or fundamental than intellectual property law? What are the implications of the increasing disconnect between the letter of the law and its practice? Sure, we've had people disregarding marijuana usage laws for decades, but that kind of disobedience was practiced behind closed doors, not in an environment that's inherently public and social.

More importantly, what are the political efforts we can catalyze if we specifically design them to be as easy to participate in as social networking is today, and if we make sure they're not aligned to the traditional structure of political parties but instead are defined by communities of interest?

I don't know the answer, but it seems increasingly likely that even the most technophobic, regressive policy makers are going to start to understand the implications of large numbers of people in loosely-defined online communities choosing to remix and reform laws on the fly without any granted authority to do so. I can't pretend to know what this development implies. What I do know is that we've seen it as a sort of odd aberration for half a decade now, but soon we'll be obligated to see it as a new political tactic to be reckoned with.

Related: The Power of the Audience, about the sense of common experience on the realtime web.

Put these in your browser, and shake well.

• Facebook apps are not a long tail. So says Chris Anderson, who oughtta know. The tougher question is: Since the recent changes to app distribution on Facebook's platform, will there ever be another popular new application on Facebook again. Or is the era of hit F8 apps over already?
• Prince is Rolling Stone's most underrated guitarist. The article's got a great shot of Prince's most ridiculously entertaining affectation of recent years: His habit of throwing his guitar away in faux-disgust at the end of his solos. His poor guitar tech Takumi is gonna take one of these spiky symbol-shaped guitars to the head one of these days while trying to make the catch.
• I loved Ian Rogers' post about digital music, "Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses". Choice quote: "Back in 1999 ... We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, 'What’s MP3?' or 'Um, no.' Instead they commenced suing Napster." Working in music promo online back then, I got to see those reactions first hand, and I guess I was equally naive.
• Rafe points to Jeff Atwood's great post about copyright and YouTube. I have the opposite conclusion than these guys: If YouTube has created something fantastic, and it required copyright violation to do so, then copyright law should be changed to make it legal. Laws are ours, people -- they're not carved on stone tablets.
• The PlayStation 3 is a complete failure for casual gaming. That's not news, but it's never been articulated as well. Especially damning is that even the fanboys can only dispute minor facts, not the fundamental conclusion.

The folks at Cranky Geeks have just put up a new episode of the show, though it was actually taped a while ago and was the first episode I ever participated in. We taped the episode before Google bought YouTube, and the bright-eyed speculation about YouTube's future during that simpler time looks downright quaint today.

Things were a little rough around the edges (it's slow going for most of the show), but you do get to hear me say, "I like the crappy videos". And you get to hear how J.D. Lasica picks out his favorite porn sites.

• I've been ruminating about radio a lot lately (more on that later), but one of the most pleasant radio discoveries of late has been XM Radio's 80s and 90s stations, as well as their "20 on 20" pop hits station. Imagine my delight when I found that AOL Radio is streaming them for free.

• Let's see: Free Jay-Z concert, cute pictures of Shiba Inus, and gratuitous Prince references. Andrea Harner's blog is apparently what I would get if I commissioned a blogger to make a site for me. For the rest of you, BuzzFeed will be more to your taste.

• How to share your event on Google Calendar. Shouldn't the microformats çrew be automating this stuff for all of us?

• Michael Arrington's taking some time off from TechCrunch. One of my main criticisms of the site has always been that he's just a youngster in blogging years. Take it from those of us who've been around for half a decade or so -- this whole "I'm quitting!" thing is only the first step in a bigger cycle. After you quit once or twice, you have to get in a big flame war, post an embarrassingly personal item to your site, have a grandiose Third Anniversary blog post, coin a catch phrase, and have your last name turned into a verb before you can even consider yourself a serious blogger. On the other hand, "TechCrunch is a new kind of publication" so maybe I know nothing.

• I like the Wired cover story on LonelyGirl15, especially because they embed a number of relevant YouTube videos into the story. But how come the it's-not-porn-we're-journalists photo shoot video isn't on YouTube, too? It'd be a great promo for the story!

• "Feature" has many definitions. It can describe a full-length movie or a particularly prominent or compelling article in a magazine or newspaper. Alternately, a feature is an individual bit of functionality in a software program or application. What do I think of Jeffrey McManus' blog post? It feels like a feature.

I love YouTube, but there's something you need to understand: YouTube just stomps around, recklessly murdering innocent bystanders. The latest casualties?

Joe Liberman's Political Career

Slate documents Lamont's ascendancy at Joe Liberman's expense, and what does John Dickerson name as the weapon of assassination? YouTube viral videos.

The Lamont videos were far more effective than tendentious blog posts, and they gave energetic supporters an outlet for their energies (a person can only pound so many yard signs). What's more, the videos offered a regular dose of entertainment to supporters who were interested but not obsessed.

Check out the Slate piece for a Top 5 list of anti-Joementum clips.

Windows Media Video

By dangling the DRM carrot in front of the legacy studios in music and movies, Microsoft was able to buy some content protected in Windows Media format. And by making Windows Movie Maker as good or better than iMovie, they were starting to get a foothold in content created by regular people. But YouTube doesn't convert Windows Media to work with its Flash player due to Microsoft's onerous restrictions, so you can't upload your Movie Maker clips to YouTube. (Naturally, Movie Maker won't output .mov or any other widely-usable formats.) Note to Microsoft: Community trumps codecs. Users see "I can't upload my Movie Maker clips to YouTube" as your bug, not theirs, and they don't want to hear about "transcoding licensing fees" just to watch funny videos.

Even if Microsoft makes it free for services to convert Windows Media Video to .flv for embedding in a Flash player (which won't happen), most of these services are running all their servers on Linux. They're not going to introduce Windows boxes into the mix just for this feature, because they're a huge additional management hassle.

My Free Time

TubeRaider alone has hours and hours of videos I could watch, if only I had the time. I consider it only fair cosmic retribution that it's costing them a bundle as well. Long live YouTube, serial killer.