My good friends at StyleFeeder (in which I have equity; see my disclosures) have today released their Personal Shopper. As seen on Mashable. It’s very cool; I love it; it is social shopping brought to IM. Imagine shopping with your friends in real-space, only together online. And, in related news, big competitor Kaboodle just got acquired by Hearst. Congratulations, Phil, Shergul, Dina, Jason, Eric, Saquora, Ted, et al.!
“Jaegercat” writes in a discussion board on this topic: “I don’t live in the US. I’ve already responded with the counter-notification via fax, but I have no idea how to proceed from here if they don’t respond. The video that they pulled was an original work that took me around 5 months to make, that has been shown in a film festival, and I feel violated at the public accusation that this wasn’t my own work. … I’m definitely interested in collective action, even though I don’t even know if I’m entitled to be part of it.”
Google News suggests that there have been about 500 stories so far written in this news sources that they scan on the topic of Viacom’s 100,000 take-down notices to YouTube users. Most of the stories focus on the business dynamics of the matter, understandably: 1) why Viacom did this; 2) the possibility (or likelihood, or unlikelihood, depending upon whom you ask) of a license deal in the offing between the two entities; 3) the response from YouTube/Google to the take-downs; 4) the status of the enhanced tools for copyright owners who want to track their works that they believe to be illegally posted; and so forth.
A few possible Day 2 stories that have not been discussed extensively in the MSM coverage, and of greater interest to me:
– How many of the 100,000 notices were mis-fires, like the one to Jim Moore? A few hundred, a few thousand? (Is this person one of them?) And what is the impact of those mistakes? Is there any pushback against the copyright holder who made these mistakes? Any liability, say under DMCA Section 512(f)? (Top10Sources, with which I work, is seeking to aggregate these stories and links to the clips that are put back up so we can all judge for ourselves.)
– Does it matter under the law whether YouTube provides the enhanced copyright protection tools that are bandied about in many of these articles? Could they release them selectively, say to those who license with them and not to those who do not?
– Why isn’t Viacom doing what CBS has done, for instance (as a Forrester analyst is asking on Charlene Li’s blog)?
– Who will build a service to compete with YouTube? Will the policy for handling copyright matter, one way or another, in terms of customer adoption of competing services?
– Is there a copyright reform strategy, and/or one or a series of business ideas (like Lisensa, e.g., with which I am involved) or extensions to NGOs like Creative Commons, that can help address the copyright crisis that continues to rage on the web?
Jim Moore has reposted, on Google Video (heh), the “offending” work that prompted the nastygram from Viacom today. It’s hard to imagine what might have prompted the take-down. As JZ asks in the comments from an earlier post, what can we surmise about the tactic in getting to 100,000 take-downs? Was some bot scanning for keywords in titles, say “Redbones”?
Perhaps we can get to the bottom of it by aggregating other misfires from in this massive take-down push. At TopTenSources (please see my disclosures), here’s a page where you can add a link to your video or enter comment about the take-downs, as well as an e-mail address — youtube.viacom@gmail.com — to which you can send word of your taken-down video. Is Jim’s video the only one that shouldn’t have been flagged? Or are there others out there — possibly with no offending content, or possibly where a fair use defense might apply?
Just post-relaunch of StyleFeeder, Kerry Purcell of the Boston Herald has a round-up piece on cool fashion sites, including SF.
(Please see my disclosures regarding my role in Top Ten Media, Inc., the parent of SF.)
Congrats to Phil and team for the relaunch on StyleFeeder. A cool site just got a whole lot cooler. In addition to the new look, check out the ratings and recommendations features. (SF is part of the Top Ten Media family, of which I am chairman; updates as necessary at my disclosures page.)
Another output of our NYSAIS workshop for teachers on using technology in the service of education: a Top10 list that we compiled together of Blogs for Teachers. Send suggestions and we can add them, too! Or create a better list of your own at Top10 Sources.
There’s also a member-created page, by an academic named Robert French, on Edublogs and Eduwikis, which is excellent. Mr. French, who teaches PR at Auburn University, himself keeps a terrific blog.
(Please see my disclosures page if you care to know about my personal involvement in Top10.)
In the past several weeks, I’ve been playing with a new format that my friends at TopTenSources developed. We’ve seen the Citizen Journalist; this idea is the Citizen Editor. Several of us have been using a new bookmarklet-style tool that makes it very easy to tag a story when you’re reading it, provide a bit of analysis, and have it posted to a dedicated website on the topic. It’s in many ways what lots of bloggers do anyway. I remember Dave Winer showing me an aspect of Manila that renders a river of news and then lets you check off stories that you want to appear somewhere — dead simple and fun; this idea is in the same vein, only using different tools and with a different output.
The one I’ve been playing with, as part of a group of “citizen editors,” is tracking the Massachusetts Governor’s Race. It’s a ton of fun. (There are a variety of perspectives among the group as to whom we support, as with most group blogs, I suppose.) As I read the utterly amazing and surging group of bloggers/MSM commentators — for instance, Blue Mass Group, GOPNews, Boston.com, Adam Reilly at the Phoenix, Kimberly Atkins at the Herald, and several dozen other blogs and news sources each day — I tag some of the best, most relevant sources and pop them into the aggregator for others to see. I think it’s pretty novel. The idea is that someone who is interested in the race, but not spending so much time in the details and reading every blog post, can come to a one-stop shop and scan the Editor’s Picks. Over time, the idea is to use a combination of technical tools to pick the most important stories from the most important sources with an editor or group of editors able to over-ride, make decisions about placement, and provide some context and editorial color. I think it’s pretty neat.
(My disclosures: I am a founder, am chairman of the Board, and hold equity in Top Ten Media, Inc., in my extra-Harvard capacity. And I am supporting Chris Gabrieli for governor and Deborah Goldberg for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.)
Jim Moore, my partner in various efforts and a former Berkman fellow, wrote up his experience in creating his own Top10 list, which anyone can do as a public aggregator, and comparing Top10Sources and Technorati Top10 lists.
My own Top10 is here.
Another cool thing is the whole tree of OPML sites that Doc is making from his notes for BloggerCon IV, as a search result in OPML Search.
(Disclosure: Top10 and OPML Search are beta sites in which Jim Moore and I both have an interest.)
John Palfrey 