Did YouTube Block Marijuana Questions in Obama Interview?
Google’s YouTube allowed viewers to submit a question for US president Obama. Over 11,000 questions were asked and over 667,000 votes were cast, YouTube writes, saying they “collected the top questions”. Now, Toke of the Town however writes that “YouTube Censors Marijuana Question In Obama Interview”:
Yes, questions about marijuana were the most popular in the CitizenTube voting Monday afternoon.
But YouTube, in a gutless move, decided at the last minute not to present the highest ranked questions to the President. (...)
So they chunked all the votes, and just picked the questions they would have asked anyway.
It seems obvious now that when YouTube said “We’ve collected the top questions,” they didn’t mean the questions viewers thought were tops. They mean the questions they picked to be tops.
Sorted by popularity, the top 3 questions of the “Other” category on the Google Moderator board set up for the purpose were:
- “Mr. President, When you asked the country to give you questions, one of the most asked was ’Are you going to legalize Marijuana’. When you read it, you laughed like it wasnt serious. Why is that?” -Anonymous, Florida
- “What are your plans for cannabis legalization?” -Anonymous, Oklahoma
- “Why don’t you legalize marijuana, it seems like a great way to gain tax money, and people should have to right to use it if they please, and it would cripple gang activity? Do you plan to?” -Lussy Picker, Kentucky
(“Other” was one of several categories, and questions were also submittable by video. Of the top 10 questions in that category, 8 were related to cannabis legalization. One other was about ensuring that the internet remains free of censorship, and another about DMCA takedown reqests suppressing freedom of speech and fair use on sites like YouTube.)
The YouTube employee doing the interview puts it this way during the introduction of the video (my emphasis): “Hello everyone, we’re here at the White House today for a very unique event: an exlusive interview with President Obama, in which the questions come from American people who’ve submitted them and chosen them online.” He continues that “all of the questions you’ll see here today were voted into the top tier of the thousands of questions we received, and none of them have been chosen by the White House, or seen by the president”.
If anyone of you has more information, please add a comment. Is above outline correct?
[Via Reddit.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Did YouTube Block Marijuana Questions in Obam ... | Comments]
[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebay
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine
The folks at Aardvark have posted an ambitious paper over on the 'vark blog. Titled after Brin and Page's original “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, the paper presents the Aardvark engine and, in its authors' words: "describes the fundamental differences between the traditional “Library” paradigm of web search — in which answers are found in existing online content — and the new “Village” paradigm of social search — in which answers arise in conversation with the people in your network."
I have read most of the paper, which has been accepted at WWW 2010 (it reminded me of all the search papers I read in preparation for writing The Search), and found a lot worthy of interest.
First, the paper's authors, both of whom have worked at Google, clearly have a sense of potential history here, in that they not only crib Google's original paper's title, they also mirror the first line (substituting "Aardvark" for "Google", of course). Now that's some b*lls. Of course, when Larry and Sergey first presented Google, they couldn't even get their paper accepted (it took three tries, if I recall correctly. Someone should write a book about that...).
Second, it's unusual for a Valley startup to lay out its architecture and technological specs as willingly as Aardvark has. There's a lot of math in here that I couldn't parse even if I had the will to try.
Third, we learn some cool things about how Aardvark works. Check this quote out: "...unlike quality scores like PageRank [13], Aardvark’s quality score aims to measure intimacy rather than authority. And unlike the relevance scores in corpus-based search
engines, Aardvark’s relevance score aims to measure a user’s potential to answer a query, rather than a document’s existing capability to answer a query."
Also interesting: " this involves modeling a user as a content- generator, with probabilities indicating the likelihood she will likely respond to questions about given topics. Each topic in a user profile has an associated score, depending upon the confidence appropriate to the source of the topic. In addition, Aardvark learns over time which topics not to send a user questions about..."
There's a lot more like this in the paper, it's worth reading. The authors even did a test of Aardvark results against Google, with the results being something of a push (see the last page for details). Not bad for an upstart service.
Lastly, we learn a lot about the service, thanks to a number of charts, including something about Aardvark's growth, which I had not really anticipated. It's up and to the right, as you can see from the chart.
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
An App Store for Google Docs, Gmail?
The Wall Street Journal writes:
Google Inc. is preparing to launch a store selling online business software that integrates with its Web services, according to people briefed by the company, enlisting software developers in its battle against Microsoft Corp.
These people said the store will sell business software designed by outside developers to integrate and add capabilities to Google Apps, such as enhanced security features or the ability to import contacts.
Google eventually plans to allow customers to purchase its partners’ software through the site, taking a cut for itself and sharing some revenue with the developers, these people said. Google will allow users to quickly access their purchased applications through the menu at the top of their screens within Gmail or Google Docs, they said.
[Thanks MBegin!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: An App Store for Google Docs, Gmail? | Comments]
[Advertisement] Directory Journal: Search Engine Friendly Directory
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Social Networks for Things
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Top 10 YouTube Mashups of All Time
Of the thousands of open APIs available, one of the all-time most popular is the YouTube API. We now list 440 YouTube mashups in our directory. Naturally, some are better than others. Below are our Top 10, as determined by popularity and editorial review. Do you know of other good YouTube apps that we’ve missed? Just let us know in the comments.
- TubeSpy: TubeSpy is an application that shows the videos being watched on YouTube as they are being watched. APIs: YouTube. More at our TubeSpy profile.
- Beardscratchers Compendium: A music-based mashup that connects and filters disparate music metadata from across the Web, with an aim towards accuracy and focus on the music. Combines many different APIs from YouTube to Last.fm. APIs: Amazon eCommerce, Echo Nest, Eventful, Flickr, Gruvr, Last.fm, MTV, MusicBrainz, Songkick, Upcoming.org, Wikipedia, Yahoo Music, Yahoo Search, YouTube. More at our Beardscratchers Compendium profile.
- popurls.com: For years now, this has been one of the most successful news dashboards on the web. It combines over 15 concensus filters into a one-page view. Good looking, Ajax interface. Includes Digg, Flickr, BoingBoing, NewsVine, del.icio.us, Reddit and others. APIs: del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube. More at our popurls.com profile.
- Viral Video Chart: See the most talked about videos…currently tracking YouTube, MySpace and Google Video. APIs: YouTube. More at our Viral Video Chart profile.
- Geo Best-of YouTube: Web mapping based application to watch most viewed videos on YouTube filtered by countries and time. APIs: Google Maps, YouTube. More at our Geo Best-of YouTube profile.
- Tagbulb: Tagbulb simplifies tag search by aggregating content from various sources like Flickr, YouTube and many more. Users can browse by content type like images, videos, blogs, bookmarks, podcasts, products, books etc. APIs: 12seconds.tv, 23, 43Things, 5min, Amazon EC2, Amazon eCommerce, AOL Video, arXiv, BBC, BibSonomy, Bing, Blinkx, Blip.fm, Blip.tv, Blogmarks, Buzznet, Cafe Press, del.icio.us, Digg, Digital Podcast, eBay, Eventful, Flickr, Floobs, FriendFeed, Google Ajax Search, Google Book Search Data, Google Friend Connect, Google Picasa, Google Search, Grouper Video, Howcast, indeed, Internet Video Archive, ISBN db, Kewego Video, Last.fm, LazyTune, LiveVideo, Ma.gnolia, Photobucket, Raw Sugar, Revver, Riya, ShareThis, Simply Hired Jobs, Smugmug, Spraci, Technorati, Twitter, Upcoming.org, Viddler , VideoSurf, Vodpod, WebShots, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Image Search, Yahoo Local Search, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Related Suggestions, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Video Search, YouTube, Zooomr. More at our Tagbulb profile.
- TimeTube: Shows YouTube videos on an interactive timeline based on keywords you enter, e.g. Barack Obama or Chocolate Rain. APIs: Dipity, YouTube. More at our TimeTube profile.
- YouFlow: A mashup combining the JavaScript effects ImageFlow and Highslide JS with the YouTube API. With YouFlow you can search all the YouTube videos, browse them with ImageFlow and open them with Highslide. APIs: YouTube. More at our YouFlow profile.
- YouTube Made Simple and Visual: View YouTube in an un-cluttered more visual way, your search terms will display 50 video images, a description is shown by hovering over each image. Google searches are shown for News, Web, Images, Books and Blogs related to search terms. APIs: Google Search, YouTube. More at our YouTube Made Simple and Visual profile.
- Your Own Music Television: This mashup takes your top 50 artists and plays random music videos by those artists. It can go full screen and you can play your lastFM friends favorite artists too. APIs: Last.fm, YouTube. More at our Your Own Music Television profile.
Related ProgrammableWeb Resources
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Picasa Web Album Limits (1000 x 1000)
Google apparently previously said that on Picasa Web Albums, you can “Store up to 8,192,000 photos from a 5MP camera”. However, Picasa is limited to 1000 albums containing 1000 pics each... which is far less than the advertised 8,192,000. People complained about this, some wanting a refund for buying additional Picasa storage, and now Google’s explanatory text reads “Store up to 10,000 photos from a 5MP camera”. [Thanks Dave K.!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Picasa Web Album Limits (1000 x 1000) | Comments]
[Advertisement] Directory Journal: Search Engine Friendly Directory
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Exploring Why Social Business Will Drive 21st Century...
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
SharePoint Social Learning Experience
I had a great conversation last week that sparked an early stage idea for what I think would be a wonderful way for learning and development organizations to leverage SharePoint better.
HP Web 2.0 for Marketing – Social Learning Experience
The concept is probably easiest to understand by considering what HP did around their course on Web 2.0 for Marketing. You can find more on this by going to the LearnTrends – SharePoint in Corporate Learning Recordings.
The basic concept was that HP’s learning organization wanted to help their marketing professionals get up to speed on the implications of Web 2.0 for HP’s marketing efforts. Of course, that’s an interesting learning problem in that the answer around “implications” is not defined.
The L&D organization created a social learning experience that brought together 60 marketing professionals from across the organization. They established a goal of having the group produce a summary of what they found and what Web 2.0 could mean for the organization. In many ways, this was a facilitated work task more than a learning experience. The L&D organization provided some instruction on the basics for how the sessions would operate and some information around Web 2.0, but a lot of the effort was discovery by the marketing professionals themselves.
In the picture below, you can see some of the mechanisms they used:
- Social Bookmarks to share resources they found
- Discussion Boards to ask questions and have discussions.
- A blog that helped spark conversations around key topics.
- A wiki that served as a repository for the resources they collected.
- Virtual class sessions to share what they were finding
- Learners were encouraged to do quick screen capture movies to explain their thoughts around particular uses of Web 2.0 technologies and share with the group.
The results were pretty incredible for HP. And it’s exactly this kind of facilitated social learning experience where the result is somewhat a work objective that makes a lot of sense.
SharePoint Social Learning Experience
Based on the above description, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with what I think would be a fantastic learning opportunity for L&D organizations who want to understand what it means to Use SharePoint in their organization as both a system for facilitating the work of L&D and as a tool to be used as part of learning solutions.
The idea would be to:
- Set a goal to produce a presentation and set of recommendations to be presented to senior L&D management
- Get a cross section of L&D professionals and possibly others within the business
- Setup an environment that will be used both as a sandbox and as a support for the learning experience
- Introduce SharePoint (and/or other technologies) to participants
- Facilitate activities and discussions that ultimately lead towards the presentation and recommendations
Of course, there’s nothing preventing variants of this being done across multiple smaller organizations. And certainly there are lots of external professionals that likely would make sense to either help make this happen or include as third party experts as part of the learning experience. See Learning Community, Peers and Outside Experts for more description of possible design elements.
I also think this is a great way to help build understanding of social learning within an organization.
I’m hoping to get feedback on this? Does it make sense as a model? Are organizations already beyond this or should it actually be a facilitated discussion around learning technologies period, not just SharePoint? Will it make the most sense as SharePoint 2010 begins to roll out into organizations?
eLearning Technology
Subscribe to the Best of eLearning Learning for updates from this blog and other eLearning blogs.
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Case study in extending RSS
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
Wikiracing
Wikipedia states: “A Wikirace ... is a race by as many people as you wish, using wikilinks to travel from one Wikipedia page to another. The first person to reach the destination page, or the person that reaches the destination using the fewest number of links, wins the race.”
Anyone dare race from Google to Doink the Clown?
[Via Milivella.]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Wikiracing | Comments]
[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebay
|
Bookmark:
|
Follow:
