People watch hundreds of millions of videos every day,

and according to the YouTube Fact Sheet, ten hours of video are uploaded every minute. Wow.

Launched in 2005, YouTube.com has grown to be one of the most visited websites of all time. But can you guess who owns it? Yes, of course! Google! Adding yet another hit to there ever-growing collection of websites. As result of the crazy amount of traffic YouTube has drawn, I wonder, “Why do people spend hours a day, watching random videos?” That question can be answered in many different ways, some of which we’ll not get into.

Not unlike many other websites (and all other media, as well), YouTube has three key purposes. Each one draws a different type of audience. Some videos are more attractive than others (i.e. How To Make A Potato Gun, a helpful guide, might be more popular than Extreme Action Sports Movie, some random kid’s skateboarding video). But the three purposes, or functions, of YouTube have rocketed it to the top of the interweb, as my mother, Andrew Wilkinson, and I call it.

YouTube is to:

1. Entertainment is the chief motive of YouTube. Drawing a plethora of video-trollers out of the woodwork, entertainment can be accounted for as the #1 purpose of online video.
2. Information is in high-demand. Always. Many people come to YouTube as a guide. The hundreds of thousands of How-To videos provide a quick and easy outlet for the incompetent (or not) American (or not) to access information.
3. I totally forgot what the last one was. Oh well!

I’ve turned to YouTube for all two and a half of these reasons. Entertainment? Actually, that one not too much. The only time I used YouTube for that was before I discovered Hulu, the TV’s killer.  Nowadays, in an effort to resist the epidemic of video-addiction, I rarely visit YouTube, despite its helpfulness when assembling a SpringFree™ trampoline. I actually know people who spend the entire day trolling the site, hoping they find that precious video, the video that’s actually interesting. Okay, maybe not entire days, but a long time.

In the spirit of the holiday season, happy viewing, merry Tube-ing, and have a good time!

As many of you have noticed, the internet has played an extremely crucial part in the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Many people are even saying that if it weren’t for the internet, he wouldn’t have won! I happen to agree. The internet was their number one source of donations during this campaign. Not only was it a very accessible option for campaign donations, but it was a lightning fast communication tool, used to spread quite viral videos around the world. Because of the web, millions and millions more people became informed, and I think that this factor definitely decided this election.

Also, the Obama website and merchandise in general is INCREDIBLY WELL DESIGNED. I cannot stress enough how much I admire (and envy) the Obama graphics team. I, along with a majority of the tech community, agree that their work will be a standard and model in Web 2.0 design for years to come. And not only their design was amazing, but the campaign site’s ease-of-use was astonishing. My favorite feature happened to be the news ticker on the homepage. It had multiple tabs, which allowed more content to be displayed with less clutter. Another sweet feature was their ‘5 Things To Do’ pane, located on the right side of the page. It had links to set up various canvassing projects, like Make Calls, Knock On Doors, Email Friends, etc. It provided an easy outlet for their supporters to help out, therefore blowing John McCain out of the water!

Like Barack Obama once said, nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change. Everything can stand in the way of millions of robots calling for hate.

The rest of this post is via TechCrunch - http://tinyurl.com/6m2d5j

New York Magazine’s John Heilemann is leading a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this morning on “The Web and Politics.” Joining him is San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Arianna Huffington and Joe Trippi.

The session jumped right off with Heilemann saying the Internet played a disruptive role in the 2008 election in the same way television played a disruptive role in the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy to president. Neither medium was new in the respective elections, but both “came of age” and swung the election towards the winning candidate. Kennedy, in particular, used television ads extensively in his campaign to reach the American voters directly, and embraced simple things like makeup:

The televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was probably the most decisive event for the election of 1960. The growth of TV as a new medium, and declined use of radio marked a significant change in how campaigns are ran today. For the TV appearence, Nixon refused to wear make-up and therefore appeared unshaven, tired and sweaty under the lights. Kennedy, however, did wear the make-up and so appeared cooler and more composed than Nixon. Kennedy, before the debate, returned tan and attractive from vacation. Not only did Kennedy appear to be better groomed, and handsome, his suit was navy popping off the grey back drop. Nixon’s suit was grey, blending in to the curtain behind him. With these factors combined, Among TV viewers agreed, Kennedy won the debate. Richard Nixon’s deep, strong, radio appealing voice won over all radio listeners, they agreed Nixon won the debate. Nixon entered the race ahead of Kennedy. Television as a new medium changed presidential elections from this point on, marking the election of 1960 significant. Radio voice failed to prevail over now “candidate centered” television campaigns.

Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be president. Trippi notes that Obama’s YouTube spots gathered an aggregate of 14.5 million viewing hours. The Internet was used by candidate previously, he said, noting the Howard Dean campaign, but Obama really leveraged it fully with online video, blogging, social networking and fundraising.

The panelists also note how mainstream media tends to fail in politics, simply reporting on what each candidate says without saying who’s right or wrong. The blogosphere, they say (particularly Trippi and Huffington), tends to call out factual inaccuracies better than mainstream media.

Howard Dean showed that the Internet could be used to raise lots of money online, say the panelists. But Newsom says social networking is significantly more powerful and allows for the creation of much more meaningful connections between the candidate and voters. “I’m addicted to Facebook,” he said.

Newsom also notes that “every single thing a candidate says, and how he says it,” is available online for people to review and judge. And he questions whether candidates today are more authentic or less authentic now that they have to be “on” all the time.

Technology site MakeUseOf.com can be described as many things, but most importantly its an outlet for “geeky fun” (cool sites, hacks, tips, etc.). Editor In Chief, Aibek Esengulov, wrote an article about the birth of MakeUseOf.com. Here it is:

“Well, basically I got the idea while I was doing my first year of masters in Denmark. After hardcore bachelors in computational science doing masters program in business was like a chill out. Easy lectures and lots of free time. Back then I used to share an apartment with 2 of my friends, none of whom had much interest in web. When it comes to me, for the last 5-6 years most of my daily life was centered around it. On top of that web was booming, so called web2.0 era’s first celebrities (Digg, Flickr, Delicious, etc.) were just starting to accumulate all the Buzz.

It was exciting moments. I would frequently start a sentence with something like; ‘Today I found out about new service that …’ and my girlfriend would be like; ‘Ok! it’s started…’ . I had lots of energy but nowhere I could apply it on. Then around march 2006, I heard about Amazon’s new bestseller ‘Naked Conversations’, everyone was talking about it, so I read it as well. Once I was done with it, I was determined to start a blog and maybe after a month or two I went ahead and registered makeuseof.com. And somewhere around July, I talked to Kaly (see below) and asked him if he would be interested to join me. As always, he was up for it. That’s mainly it.

As about makeuseof.com, it’s very different from most of the other tech blogs/websites. It’s unique and original in what it reviewes and how it does it. On makeuseof we don’t write about any new web applications that comes around but only about ones that are COOL, FREE and USEFUL. It may be a subjective judgement but that’s how it is. We also try to keep it simple and all accessible, so that even newbies who never used such sites like Digg and Delicious or ones who think AJAX is famous washing powder brand can easily find their way around.

Period”

Move over Second Life. The 3D Web is starting to make inroads into the plain old browser. By “plain,” I mean only Internet Explorer on Windows machines—which for now is what you need to experience Vivaty Scenes. But at least it’s a start. (Firefox support on PCs is coming in a few weeks, but Mac support is being pushed off further). - TechCrunch

Am I the only one who thinks 3D internet absolutely pointless? Think about it. With Vivaty, you walk around your Facebook life, interact with the room and virtual newspapers or whatever. Here’s what I think, “Guess what they just came out with! Real life!! You can eat and walk around and like ride cars and stuff!” How about that for 3D stuff? Well, I guess Vivaty and its kin could prove to be relatively entertaining sometimes, but still. But not only is it just a waste of time, a lot of people, including me, feel that things like this (and also World of Warcraft, especially) promote bad habits and anti social behavior. Its actually proven in a lot of cases that it does.

As always, post a comment and say what you think about Vivaty or Second Life or virtual worlds in general. Thanks!

Feeling quite shocked, I am writing this post after viewing a short video that informed me about the ideology behind Google. I had known before that immense amounts of data can be collected from the internet, but I had not known the slightly sinister scheme that some major website administrations have. Now I realize just how hopeless the battle against excessive internet data collection is. Although it will take very much time and effort, our identities–you, your person–can be rescued from the clutches of this virtual evil.

Although some company’s practices for data collection are intruding and unlawful, it can be for a good cause, although not entirely. Facebook is known to send peoples profile data to businesses, allowing them to adjust their sales methods by targeting certain types of people. The data that these companies now have access to will allow them to pin point customers that they almost know will be interested in their product. This boosts business, but exposes our identities. Another instance of good natured data collection is when it is used to fight crime. Police and government agencies–and, unfortunately, bad guys, too–have access to information that could potentially save lives. Using computers, police officers can track the exact location of almost any criminal. If you feel insecure and unsafe now, you should begin to practice internet safety measures. These won’t do very much, but slightly reduce data collections effect. For more information on how to do this, either leave a comment here, email me, or find references through a search engine.