In may 2007, The US military cut off access to YouTube and other video-sharing sites on all of its overseas computers as the blocked sites are simply consuming too much bandwidth on overseas link:

“We’re not passing any judgment on these sites,” Julie Ziegenhorn, a spokesperson for US Strategic Command “we’re just saying you shouldn’t be accessing them at work. This is a bandwidth and network management issue. We’ve got to have the networks open to do our mission. They have to be reliable, timely and secure.”

As an alternative, on November 11 2008 they created a video-sharing Web site for troops, their families, and supporters, called TroopTube. the site has a look and function very much like YouTube, with one major difference: a Pentagon employee screens each video upload for taste, copyright violations, and national security issues.

Technically, you need to be a member of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, or National Guard to register with the site for uploading. However, there are also options to register as a family member or civilian friend.

TroopTube limits videos to 5 minutes in length and 20MB in size, as opposed to 10 minutes and 1024MB of YouTube. Unlike YouTube, you can’t rate a video but just leave comments.

According to the Associated Press, TroopTube was built with the help of Delve Networks, a four-month-old start-up that builds advanced tools for approving, sorting, and managing videos.

Delve’s technology automatically generates the video content into different file sizes to feed the viewer best depending on his or her Internet connection. This makes the site more bandwidth-friendly than YouTube and other movie sites. The company also creates a text transcript from the uploaded videos’ sound tracks for better and more relevant search results.

Source:

• http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070514-defense-department-uses-youtube-bans-youtube.html
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10096018-1.html

A new video service has just came to the web. Unlike any other, Hulu is a video service that provides professional programming in a way that has never been allowed before, different that Youtube or other video service. The programming might not be perfect yet, but the site provides legitimate movies and serial TVs, such as The Office, Battlestar Galactica, Family Guy, and Law & Order, The Karate Kid and Men in Black. The great thing about the site is that it provides TV program without needing to drop a few bucks or search through a programming guide to find out when it’s coming. Hulu even enable people to watch the show you missed last night (in most instances) and only sit through a handful of short commercials to do it.

According to www.compete.com, Hulu is currently enjoying unbelievable growth and has almost broken the top 1,000 list of most popular sites. Even better for the service, its inventory of ads is already filled and the demand for advertising on Hulu has exceeded supply.

Here is the screen shot of the main page of Hulu (www.hulu.com):

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10013326-17.html

About one year ago, Viacom filed for a 1 billion dollar lawsuit against Youtube and Google for breaking numerous copyright it owned. Viacom (short for Video and Audio Communication) is an American media conglomerate that has a worldwide interest in cable and satellite television networks, and movie production and distribution. The company said that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had collectively been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Viacom went on saying that Google did very “little or nothing” for stopping the upload of the illegal material on the video-sharing site. Although Google officials declared that everything related to the website is being done in perfect accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Viacom feels differently and described the website as an “explosion of copyright infringement” online.

The case went on and earlier this month, the judge granted Viacom’s request to give Viacom copies of its user log records over the last few years, to support its case in a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against Google. Google will be able to conceal the identities of YouTube users when it hands over a database of their viewing habits to Viacom in response to a court order, the companies agreed Monday, July 14th 2008.

Although Google must still provide Viacom with the database logging which videos were viewed on the YouTube site and when, it can modify the user ID, visitor ID and IP address fields showing who watched the videos and from where. Google will replace the data in those fields with unique values preserving the relationship between them but protecting the anonymity of YouTube users, according to legal papers filed jointly by the two companies in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The agreement likely will help allay the fears about possible disclosures of personal information, although much will depend on the process that Google uses to choose the values that it will use to replace the user IDs and other information in the database.

When researchers at AOL published logs of the online users conducted by about 658,000 of its users in 2006, some of those users were quickly identified despite the fact that their usernames were replaced with unique, anonymous codes. AOL promised to beef up its data privacy policies after that incident, which resulted in the resignation of the company’s chief technology officer and the firing of two researchers as well as the filing of a lawsuit against AOL.

As part of the agreement between Google and Viacom, the latter company said it will “not engage in any efforts to circumvent the encryption” used to conceal the IP addresses and YouTube user IDs in the logging database.

Source:
Viacom allows Google to conceal YouTube username in court case

On May 19^th, Senator Lieberman wrote a letter to Google CEO, Eric Schmidt to delete all of the videos that was produced by any Islamic Terrorist Organizations that was uploaded in YouTube. Many of these videos are sent by the members of the Al-Qaide that shows the attacks on US forces in which made the American Soldiers injured and killed. They say that those videos are committed to killing Americans and this should not be tolerated, and the promoting of such should not be allowed on YouTube.

However, YouTube has refused the request and only remove some of the provocative videos that kept the others saying that they do not violate YouTube’s community guidelines as their argument. In their blog post, the YouTube team responded that their main concern was that of free speech and that those that disagree with the videos may respond in the space provided for replies. This way, the site is made richer by everyone’s point of view rather than to be left as a debate.

Some community still cannot acknowledge video sharing site as a tool to express an individual thoughts. This shows that freedom of speech, which is the policy of YouTube, is still not accepted by some part of the community. Freedom of speech has affected people in different ways socially.

Source: http://www.gameshout.com/newsc/senator_lieberman_demands_youtube_remove_terrorists/article2454.htm

Here is the screenshot of Video phlow which is going to be tested on private beta next week:

As can be seen from the picture, the video was taken from YouTube and from there it was shared through Videophlow by the users. Videophlow is similar to a blog where people are able to communicate to each other and watch the same video simultaneously. There is some actions that can be done such as throwing tomatoes at the video or giving the video a heart. Of course, this is still on private beta and still currently on test version. There are some possibilities that the designer can add some more actions to the web 2.0 applications.

Oortle is taking video sharing site such as YouTube to the next step. The company behind Photophlow which is a site that presents a lively chat room around the flickr photo-sharing site, is announcing Videophlow, their second product. Videophlow allows people to post a video into a chatroom and allows the users in that chatroom to control the video playback. And as with photoflow, users can use VideoPhlow to take advantage of the YouTube features such as leaving comments, marking videos as favourites and searching videos.

Videophlow allows a group of people to watch and share a video simultaneously as they interact with each other; by chat, emoticons, gestures, or even perform tasks such as throwing virtual tomatoes at the screen.

Videophlow was announced to the public on the very first time in 24 April, 2008, and a private beta test version will be unleashed in two weeks.

1. http://extratech.blogspot.com/2008/04/videophlow-tries-to-enliven-youtube.html
2. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/24/videophlow-makes-youtube-a-group-experience/

YouTube was banned in Indonesia over the Fitna video just a few days ago. The video was directed by Geert Wilders and has made a false accusation on the Muslim. Because of this, the government of Indonesia has made a decision to block YouTube. The censorship did not last very long, it only lasted for two days. Not only that they were faced accusation of the censorship, but the government also received complaints from business owners saying that it affects their livelihoods.

Video sharing websites allow users to share, view and upload video clips. They were long known for their way to connect people, especially YouTube which has nearly 79 million people in January alone, which becomes an advantage for companies trying to sell their products. Through this video sharing website, business owners can promote their products by uploading their music videos, advertisement, commercials and documentaries. Lots of companies such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi and McDonalds have uploaded their commercials and are available to watch in YouTube. Up to 100,000 of people have watched them, which is one of the reasons why these companies could become so famous around the world.

1. http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Indonesia_Bans_YouTube_MySpace/551-88382-643.html\
2. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=548528&in_page_id=1770

Video sharing websites are not only used for education and entertainment, but it is also used as a promotion tool, as what we could see throughout YouTube. these websites allow a group of people, such as bands, to promote their songs through video clips.

One such example is a band called Ok Go which have used YouTube to promote their single, called Here it Goes Again. It was debuted on YouTube on July 31, 2006 and on March 27, 2008, it has been viewed over 32 million, holding the 24th place of the most viewed video of all time and 4th on most favourite video. The tremendous online success has led to sales boost of their album over the last two years, and won them grammy award of the best short form music video on 2007 and YouTube award for most creative video on 2006.

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/
2. http://media.www.browndailyherald.com/

Technological situation

• Technological specifications:
  
  • pentium 4
  • HDD capacity 80 GB
  • 1 GB RAM
  • Windows XP service pack 2 (always updating)
    
  • Intel core duo processor 2.80 GHz

  
  

• Internet connectivity:
  Speedy (ADSL)

• Computer protection:
  AVG 7.5 Antivirus and AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5 (Updates automatically)
  

Technological Strength:

• Technological basics (inside the PC, hardware, software, storage devices, etc)
• Social and Ethical issues on robots, expert system, AI and other technological devices
• Introduced to HTML coding
• Introduced to creating flash animation
• Good at playing computer games (Counter-strike)

Technological Weaknesses:

• Not really up-to-date with technological news
• Never play online games (Warcraft, Ragnarok online, etc)
• Cannot repair technical computer problems.

I keep up-to-date with technological news by reading on www. pcworld.com