Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

30-04-2007

by Damien Mulley

This week Rattleblog looks at further BBC TV endeavours, YouTube as a tool of defiance, the danger of clicking Google Ads, and how Twitter-like clones are starting to pop up on Facebook and Bebo.

Engadget reports that the BBC now wants to offer HDTV versions of all their shows on a free-to-view satellite service. The BBC already offers its shows via Bittorrent, YouTube, IPTV and over the air digital TV. A new joint venture with ITV will mean this satellite service will be able to reach the current 20 percent of people who cannot get the digital TV version of their services.

Meanwhile Larry Lessig reports that eyeVio, the long-awaited Sony competitor to YouTube was launched in Japan and all uploads automatically come with a Creative Commons licence. This means people can be permitted to share, edit and reuse video content, depending on what the original uploader specifies.

Staying with video, it looks like after a long journey and lots of promises, YouTube and Google might finally start to put ads on YouTube content by early summer. Up to now, new owner Google was concentrating on removing copyrighted content and sorting out various legal messes.

Still with YouTube, in a show of defiance against the recent shootings in Virgina Tech, people are uploading absurd recreations of plays written by murderer Cho Seung-Hui.

Moving to Google news, Search Engine Land reports on how Google Ads were used to infect the computers of unsuspecting people who clicked on the adverts. These ads lured people to click on them, and then redirected internet users to malicious websites that installed viruses on their computers designed to steal personal passwords.

John Battelle meanwhile suggests that Google is even more arrogant than everyone thinks. He highlighted that at a recent meeting between Google staffers, one future scenario was the buying of Yahoo with a quote from a staffer saying "For example, if Google decides it wants to buy Yahoo." Search expert Battelle thinks that's just a little presumptuous, and the assimilation of Yahoo would not be so easy.

Inside Google also gives Google a hard time for making a big announcement about buying video conferencing software for internal usage. At first many people thought Google was about to release videoconferencing software to all and sundry, but on further clarification, it seems it Googlers will just use the software amongst themselves. Rattleblog would like to formally announce that we are acquiring a bag of crisps and a bottle of red lemonade to be used at our next tea break.

Despite Twitter being loathed by a large percentage of people, it hasn't stopped the service from being cloned. Mashable reports that Facebook has now rolled out a very similar service to their users. Meanwhile Bebo has also created a Twitter-like quite like it. It may be annoying but it seems everyone wants to be annoying. [Bebo Twitter. Bitter? - Ed]

Lastly, Arstechnia highlights a survey that shows 80 percent of blogs have some kind of offensive content on them. However, offensiveness is quite subjective, and what one person finds offensive, another will not find bothersome at all.

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.