Youtomb Site For Banned Youtube Vids

Man I love the idea of this site would just be great if they offered links to taken down videos but I guess that could create problems for them…oh well it’s still cool. Saw it @ wired

Where do videos go when they “die” or are booted off YouTube for copyright infringement?

Meet YouTomb.

Created by a group of MIT students, the virtual video graveyard combs through Google’s data and archives information about clips that have been removed from YouTube.

Banned clips aren’t available for viewing or download on YouTomb — that’s not the purpose of the site, says Dean Jansen, one of project creators.

“We’re not interested in bootlegged videos of [anime show] Naruto that got taken down,” said Jansen in a phone interview Tuesday. “It’s about fair use, and remixes or performances forced off YouTube.”

YouTube — which has run into controversy for pulling guitar parodies and satirical music videos due to copyright claims — recently launched a filtering service that identifies possible copyright violations and lets rights-holders decide if they want to flag videos for removal.

Jansen says the site’s opaque policies spurred the YouTomb project.

“We aren’t trying to be antagonistic at all,” said Jansen. “We understand YouTube has a business to run. But at the same time, we’re not sure where it ends.”

Alongside a screenshot of each clip deemed in violation, YouTomb lets users see who posted the offending video, how many views it got before being pulled, when it was removed and by whom (for instance at the request of the user, a media company or third-party).

YouTomb, which launched about two months ago, is currently monitoring close to a quarter-million videos, and Jansen says the team is eager to expand its scope. Currently, the site only monitors popular YouTube videos, but Jansen hopes to span as many YouTube data sets as possible.

YouTomb is considering offering code to bloggers to use when embedding YouTube videos. That way, when videos were taken down, users could see stats and data instead of a simple error message.

YouTube representatives did not offer comment by press time, but according to Jansen, who claims to have several friends at Google’s video site, the two organizations have a “friendly disposition” toward one another.

“We aren’t going to unearth the magic algorithm that Google is using [to filter possible copyright infringements],” said Jansen. “But we can shed some light on what YouTube is doing.”

[via Waxy.org]

King Of Digg Mr Baby Man

Source readwriteweb.

Andrew Sorcini lives in Los Angeles, works as an animator for Dinsney and is the most powerful user that social news site Digg.com has ever seen. Known at Digg and elsewhere as MrBabyMan, Sorcini has submitted a site-leading 2,400+ stories that have hit the site’s coveted front page. Those front page submissions have delivered an estimated 50 million pageviews to the sites the submissions came from. A good number of those submissions have been RWW articles, and we appreciate that.

For months, a small but outspoken number of Digg’s millions of other users have complained about seeing as many as three or four MrBabyMan submissions on the front page at one time. As we write this he has two front page stories. Those successes are outshined, however, by the most popular story on Digg Friday night: a cartoon accusing MrBabyMan of stealing stories from smaller Digg users.

Joshua Klein’s vending machine for crows

Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he’s come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.

Joshua Klein will hack anything that moves — his list includes “social systems, computer networks, institutions, consumer hardware and animal behavior.” His latest project, though charmingly low-tech, has amazing implications for the human-animal interface.

Right now, Klein is working at Frog Design as a Principle Technologist, while developing mobile/social applications, health care-related systems and other tools that improve people’s lives. He’s the author of the novel Roo’d, which was the first modern book (after Tarzan) to be ported to the iPhone.

“Klein envisions a new symbiotic relationship between these intelligent birds and the humans that encroach on their habitat. … Why not turn a longstanding rivalry between man and crow into something that profits both species?”

Source boingboing

Nominations Open For ADCOLOR

Veronica Webb ADCOLOR Awards Host

The ADCOLOR™ Industry Coalition, a historic collaboration among The ADVERTISING Club of New York (AD CLUB NY), the American Advertising Federation (AAF), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Arnold Worldwide, invites nominations for the 2008 ADCOLOR™ Awards. The awards, hosted by model/TV Host Veronica Webb, launched in 2007 to honor and celebrate the accomplishments of outstanding diverse professionals in the advertising, marketing and media industries. Nominations are now open and can be submitted online at www.adcolor.org by Friday, July 25, 2008.

With last year’s inaugural event drawing more than 108 nominations, this year’s categories include Rising Star, Innovator, Change Agent, Legend and the newest addition, MVP (Most Valuable Partnership)—which celebrates agencies, marketers or media companies that partner to provide innovative diversity solutions to their respective organizations and industries. Honorees such as Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Jr. in addition to executives from companies including BBDO, Procter & Gamble, YAHOO! and The Martin Agency were recognized in 2007 for their achievements.

Upcoming Events

Cool list of events I found @ http://darmano.typepad.com/

May 22-23 Strategy 08
I will be covering one of my favorite events of the year via Twitter. Speakers include AG Lafley, Roger Martin, Bill Buxton, Bruce Nussbaum, and Claudia Kotchka among others. Follow me on Twitter here.

May 29th: Tech Cocktail
I’ll be speaking on a panel titled “Creating A Brand & Leveraging New/Social Media For Your Business”. Tech Cocktail is taking place in Chicago and will include Jason Fried of 37 Signals, Gary Vaynerchuck, and Frank Gruber among others.

June 5-6: The Conference Board
I’ll be co-leading a workshop for a powerhouse audience including senior execs from fortune 500 companies. The workshop will be titled, “Positively Influencing Brand Behavior”.

June 16-17
I’ll be speaking at Widget Web Expo and have assembled a fine panel of professionals including:
Brian Morrissey: Adweek
David Malouf: Motorola
Ian Schafer: CEO, Deep Focus
Steph Agresta: Internet Geek Girl

Our panel will discuss “micro interactions” from the perspective of portable, distributed content and functionality. We’ll discuss the potential or lack of for all this to go mainstream. Other speakers include Forrester’s Josh Bernoff, Stowe Boyd, and Marc Canter to name a few.

YouTube “Buzz Marketing”

YouTube announced a new advertising product today called “buzz targeting” . YouTube will monitor videos that are seeing an acceleration of viewing, favoriting and ratings, and give advertisers the ability to piggyback on this group of videos.

YouTube said via email the product was one of the new ad innovations Google CEO Eric Schmidt had foreshadowed in an interview last month.

Lionsgate piloted the product with ads for its movie The Forbidden Kingdom. According to YouTube, ads for the film “ran against more than 500 of the most popular partner videos in music and entertainment, including content from major music labels and videos from users in the YouTube Partner Program.”

One downer of Buzz targeting, like other YouTube ad products, it does not apply to videos uploaded by people who are not YouTube revenue-sharing partners, so advertisers will still miss out on some of the most viral content on the site. Like this the most watched YouTube video of the day which features some Japanese girl getting into a hottub with just a towel on!

Even Online Ads Slumping

According to this study even online ad sales may be slumping.

So much for the theory that online ad networks are immune to an economic slowdown: PubMatic, a company that helps online publishers sift through ad network offerings to find the highest-priced ad, said average ad network prices were down 23% from March to April.

But here’s the disturbing part: In March, advertisers on the 300-plus major online ad networks paid an average of $0.49 to reach 1,000 people. In April, that dropped to $0.39. We’re not sure what’s worse: the month-to-month drop or the pittance that ad networks pay publishers for their display ad inventory.

Big sites fared worse than small ones. Ad rates for big sites (more than 100 million page views a month) dropped 52% to $0.18 in April from $0.38 in March (do I hear free?). Medium sites (1 million to 100 million page views a month) were nearly flat with rates dropping a cent to $0.33 from $0.34, while small sites actually improved to $1.29 in April from $1.18 in March.

Ads served on social networks cratered to $0.19 in April from $0.37 in March, which fits with what we’ve heard from News Corp. (NWS) and Google (GOOG) about their problems selling ads on MySpace.

How does PubMatic know all this? It gets data from 3,000 online publishers which use the system (85% in the U.S.) and encompasses data from all the major ad networks.

source

What’s Now. Social Media Stats.

Pretty amazing to see how the numbers within Social Media have leapfrogged in the last months. This report from Universal McCann is not shocking, but pretty impressive numbers for sho.

http://www.slideshare.net/