Hey Google – where are my flappin’ videos?

is this google’s idea of a graceful exit?

Google recently sent the users of video.google.com service a notice saying that it was discontinuing this service, and urging them to migrate their videos to YouTube.

forget one-click migration to YouTube, my videos have disappeared altogether, and there’s no one to talk to.

I had a couple of dozen of videos on google video. when I logged in to download and move them, they simply weren’t there. oh well, I thought, momentary glitch. but no – they haven’t re-appeared. support? google have closed down all the google video forums, so you can’t post any issue.   Strangly enough, even the service termination notice doesn’t appear on  video.google.com or any of google’s official blogs. For lack of alternatives, I posted an issue on the YouTube support forum. I haven’t received any response.

Ok, google has the right to shut down a free service it has been providing for years. A bit of a longer notice period would be nice, some migration tools would ease the pain. But that’s up to them. However, this goes way beyond reasonable behaviour. Can I please have my videos back?

#iranelection: the revolution will b twtrd.

99% of the time twitter is TWOTer (Total Waste of Time). Then comes #cairospeech or #iranelection.

The Daily Dish reports that the Iraninan regime has locked down all other communications, but Twitter is live.

Follow the events on #iranelection

And on http://iran.twazzup.com/

renjie has a list of Twitterers posting from inside Iran (via Reddit)

http://twitter.com/alirezasha

http://twitter.com/Gita

http://twitter.com/iran09

http://twitter.com/iranbaan

http://twitter.com/IranRiggedElect

http://twitter.com/mahdi

http://twitter.com/mohamadreza

http://twitter.com/mousavi1388

http://twitter.com/Mynumberone1988

http://twitter.com/Shahrzadmo

http://twitter.com/smileofcrash

http://twitter.com/StopAhmadi

http://twitter.com/tehranelection

http://twitter.com/TwitPersia

http://twitter.com/Change_for_Iran

http://twitter.com/ramezanpour

http://twitter.com/Keyvan

http://twitter.com/KeyvanGheissari

http://twitter.com/y_shar

http://twitter.com/IranElection09

http://twitter.com/parhamdoustdar

follow them. show them that they are not alone.

thank you…? f&£k you!

update II, 27 Jan, 2009:

Found it! scroll down.

Thanks http://www.leftlanenews.com/chrysler-publishes-thank-you-ad.html for the copy, and here are a few cached comments: http://consumerist.com/5137457/chrysler-buys-ads-thanking-you-for-tax-money-you-get-pissed-chrysler-censors-you

update, 27 Jan, 2009:

Chrysler have removed the blog post. Does anyone have it cached? Waybackmachine & google cache not good.

I love it when old school corporates try to go web2.0, endless laughs guaranteed:

Hey Crysler!   You’re not welcome.  You took my hard earned tax dollars without congressional approval.  This is not the time for a “thank you.”  This would be a good time for a refund…and an apology. http://rightklik.net

Mr. Nardelli,
It takes a man with a whole lotta chutzpah to thank a person for investing in a company when they had zero voice in the matter.
My elected representatives decided ‘no’.  The executive branch decided ‘yes’ through means that might be legal but frankly smell like rotten fish.
You may certainly get my money this way, but you will never see a dime of my money voluntarily spent on any of your products.
Brian Dunbar
Neenah, Wisconsin

Mr Nardelli, Fire your PR and advertising teams and execs immediately.  We the People did not want to see any more ads and money wasted on ads, be it from Chrysler, et al, or from your own pocket.  You should have put up a website thanking the people and just submitted it to various online news aggregators for free.  Once again, I am pained to see you are demonstrating a lack of common sense and fiscal responsibility.  We supported the bailout of the car companies, even in the face of the horrendously mismanaged and secretive bailout of banks, and you stlil throw money away in the name of your company.  Time to wake up. Sincerely, Matt and the rest of the Internet.

Thank You? Kiss mine you looters. I had ZERO choice in the matter. The money was taken from me by FORCE of GOVERNMENT and given to you.  Ads like this reaffirm my decesion to buy a Honda last year. Bottom line Chrysler- I WILL NEVER BUY FROM A COMPANY THAT POINTS A GUN TO MY HEAD AND THEN SAYS THANKS. This ad infuraties me. Rot in hell scumbags.

here’s an idea: instead of thanking people for what they didn’t want, why don’t you use the web to ask them what they do want? then maybe you can produce stuff that will actually sell on the market.

Since Chrysler is apparently having some technical difficulty with their site, I thought I’d show them my appreciation by hosting a copy of the ad here. Please feel free to share your sentiments:

Take it from the Dod

CCN - Collaborative campaign news thingy

The Dod is a master hacker and overall kewl kat who has been putting his skills in the service of good people for many years. Currently on his agenda is the campaign against biometric ID in Israel (Hebrew). As part of his support for that campaign, he has developed a very clever widget which allows a group of people to collaboratively update a news ticker and embed it on various sites. The ticker is very web2.0, with flickr galeries and all. RSS coming soon.

Here’s the use scenario. You’re running a campaign, and need to constantly collect and distribute news in real time. You have 0 budget but a good group of activists.

Old school: nominate a PR person, have everyone email her the news, she edits them and maintains a website.

New school: open a private room on friendfeed, everyone joins the room and picks up the bookmarklet, and starts pushing news to the room. Next, everyone picks up this widget and plug it into their blogs, sites, etc. Now the news is flowing from the people to the people by the people.

The Dod has promissed twitter feedout and other goodies, but will not say when. With a bit of nudging, he’s ported the widget, and its documentation, to English. Only bummer is that it doesn’t work on wordpress.com. It works fine on blogspot, or on hosted wordpress.

The original, as used by the Israeli human rights society's campaign against biometric ids, as seen on Bracha Goleshet

free soul food, or the Atheist food kitchen

Clay Shirky asks:

Would it be possible to run an atheist soup kitchen? (This isn’t an entirely idle question…)

Easy.

A soup kitchen needs some fixed assets (space, pots, plates), and a reliable supply of three resources:

• Perishable goods, aka groceries.
• Manpower
• Modest finances to cover operating costs.

Let’s assume we have an intitial investment to cover fixed costs (from municipalities, foundations, etc.). The main challenge is sustaining a flow of resources over time. So –

• Use http://www.freecycle.org/ to allow businesses and individuals to contribute borderline dated consumables. There’s more going down the drains than you need, and you’d be helping the environment at the same time. Might need to liaise with the http://www.freecycle.org/ guys to tweak their terms of service, but I don’t see a problem there.
• Use http://www.timebank.org.uk/ to recruit and time-manage volunteers.
• Use facebook causes, http://www.justgiving.com/ and similar to raise money. You can also use these and other social-net’ing tools to recruit and promote.

Now, for some administrative health:

• Use a wiki (such as wikia or google sites) to share organisational knowledge among kitchens.
• Maintain a public facing blog, with at least 2 posts a day: one informational, one opinion.
• Use google app engine to construct and manage your operations database.
• Use ZohoCRM to manage supply chains.
• List locations of your soup kitchens on http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

And some PR:

• Get the right people to blog about you.
• Get some good viral videos out there on youtube.
• Publish a constant flow of heart-warming stories of champion volonteers and some heart-breaking stories of your clients.

Most important:

Make a habit of innovation. Make your core service 5% more eficient each year, and use the residue to develop new services.

By the way, here in the civilised world we have an atheist soup kitchen, its called a welfare state. Not as streamlined, not as sexy, but it does keep people from freezing in the streets.

knight news challenge, 2nd round

My entry (small worlds network) is up for votes:

http://generalprop.newschallenge.org/SNC/ViewItem.aspx?pguid=54e1c82d-5dd9-4918-aae6-4634fccca5a0&itemguid=916e8ff1-8700-438d-b851-83703a2fdae8

this project will connect existing open-source tools and web2.0 sites to create a platform that will allow users to broadcast and subscribe to news by location, time, and topic. Users will be able to send and receive items by SMS, MMS, email, microblogs, RSS, instant messengers and social networking sites. Users will also be able to tag and rate incoming items. The unique feature of the system is the ability to define a subscription “radius”, which will direct news from the proximity of the selected location / time / topic. For example, if I subscribe to sport news in a radius of 10km of my home, I will receive any item posted to that topic within that range. The proximity variance will create a dynamics of information cross-over, engendering unexpected links between communities of shared, or close, interest. Thus, the “small worlds” property of human networks will be expressed and enhanced, empowering individuals to access the knowledge they want and build communities around common agendas. The core of the system will be the news routing engine, which will collate items from a variety of sources and distribute them to masses of subscribers. The system will provide several straightforward user interfaces, via web, SMS commands, and iPhone and Android apps. More elaborate interfaces will be provided as components for social networking sites and mashups (e.g. with googlemaps). The requested funding is intended to cover the fist year of development and operation. After that, the system should sustain itself through advertising and commissioned channels. Users will have a choice of several subscription options, from free and open ad-supported to corporate rented closed and ad free. The free option will always be available, and will be supported by the paid ones.

Open up!

Jonathan Gray’s been busy. Open Knowledge Foundation is hosting two THREE interesting events in November:

Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information
, Saturday 1st November 2008, 1030-1600, London Knowledge Lab

The UK Government produces and distributes a vast amount of documents and datasets – from national statistics to environmental information, from socio-economic data to legal material. Recent technologies allow this information to be explored, built upon and made accessible in new ways – whether through visual representation, semantic interlinking, or through social media applications.

This informal, hands-on workshop will bring government information experts together with those who are interested in finding and re-using government information. In addition to focused discussions about legal and technological aspects of re-use, government information assets will be documented and tagged on CKAN, a registry of knowledge resources.

and

Open Everything, Thursday 6th November, 0900-1730, Chalk farm Roundhouse (London)

On 6 November 2008, London will host an Open Everything event, a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of ‘open’. The conversation will cover, well, everything. Qualifier: the ‘thing’ in question is built using openness, participation and self-organisation. There are people coming to talk about open technology, media, education, workplace design, philanthropy, public policy and even politics. These people want to tell you what they’re doing and find out what you’re up to. And they’d like to have lunch with you. That’s why they’re coming to Open Everything. For more on what we mean and why it matters, check out: http://www.openeverything.net.

and

Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources, Nov. 8th, London Knowledge Lab

This informal, hands-on workshop will focus on finding and re-using open scientific resources – including open and public domain data, open access journal articles, and open educational materials. We will look at existing tools for discovering open material, metadata standards for relevant material in different domains, and how researchers go about looking for the material they need.

In addition to focused discussions about legal and technological aspects of re-use, open scientific resources will be documented and tagged on CKAN, a registry of knowledge resources.

Listen to Eric Lee

Finally. Someone says it out loud. Its not about the platform, the flash, the wiz, the bang. Its about getting unions – or any action group for that matter – to own their site. Owning it just like they own their placards and paint.
SO if they want a blog, give them a blog. If they want a FB page (yuck) let them have it, as long as they make it themselves.

| digg story

geek delight

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Gordon Brown plays ask me on YouTube

Inspired by Mic Jager and Keith Richards, Gordon Brown embarks on yet another heroic effort to prove that he’s not a communication hazard. The Downing st. YouTube channel “has launched a regular initiative, ‘Ask the PM’, where he will be responding to the most popular questions submitted by the YouTube community.”

Its worth a visit just to hear him say I’m delighted to launch this new initiative.

| digg story