Denmark's Smallest Island

Blog need pictures - more pretty Denmark@Christmas.

Brazil Bans YouTube?

I heard that Brazil's ordering Youtube offline because some pretty celebrity got videoed having sex with somebody who's not somebody else, it's the most viewed video ever in Brazil etc etc etc

So I thought I'd see if you could find it on YouTube - I did, here, but a search for the lady in question's name Daniela Cicarelli, yields several pages of tame modelling shot montages - is this youtube/google trying to avoid legal action? Creative PR management? Cover-Up? or just people spamming a term likely to have high search volume right now? Could be all or none of those - who really cares - I just found it funny that people kept reposting it after youtube delisted the clip. You can't stop it guys, you can advertise the shit out of the content, but you can't stop it now.

Communications Sans Frontiere

Excuse my French if incorrectly spelled, but I was listening to some foreign radio stations the other day, and I tuned in to DR P3 (Danmark's Radio - radio 3 being their closest equivalent to BBC Radio 1 or BBC 6 Music) when they announced between an afternoon of ambient indie Scandinavian cool, that they had a technology expert coming in to chat.

What did they talk about? Youtube, Google - the top searches of the year etc etc and then The Venice Project, Jimmy Wales' Wiki-esque search project and all things 2.0

I'm starting to see how pervasive this free-data/social media movement is becoming and how fast shared ideas and concepts are able to spread wordlwide, transcending language and cultural barriers infinitely quicker than the written word ever could just a relatively few years ago.

Data everywhere, so...much...data...

Lessig 23C3

Antony Mayfield's post linked to an interesting video by Mr Lessig who's some sort of law/internet/academic guru by the looks of this Wikipedia post. I've not watched the whole video yet, but he begins by showing some video mash-ups, and talking of a generation growing with a new literacy, the literacy of being able to manipulate, edit create and reorganise a staggering range of multimedia-content with great ease.

Most of what he shows in the first 10 mins is entertaining, but really just a glimpse of the creative outputs that remain barely harnessed globally and what these media editing/sharing tools can and will produce. I'm thinking here of a blog post I read (I'll link it in when I remember) that predicted medical search would drive the progress of search, at least the current algorithmic behemoths and their quality scores. This subject gained front-page press in the UK freesheets and tabloids late in 2006 - and the need for impartial and accurate SERPs will surely be driven forward when accuracy depends on the diagnosis of disease and preservation of human life, presuming that is that all results providers truly seek to "do no evil" - let's hope that is indeed so.

Google is a data fiend, a veritable whore of our data-linked lives. If you've used a selection of their services regularly at any point the usage patterns, behavioural, intellectual insights and propensity for creative interpretation and manipulation of data from Blogger, Google Search, YouTube, Maps, News, Analytics etc. is mind-boggling.

Anyhow, I'll comment further on Lessig's hour-long speech when I've got around to watching it all.