Over the weekend many of the most popular Youtube videos began to disappear. Despite its success, Youtube was still a small company with limited finances and its acquisition by Google was like slapping a giant target sign on its back — you can practically see the dollar signs appearing in the eyes of copyright holders. As the infringing videos are systematically removed, its future is uncertain. The hardcore users will continue to use it, as they use their videos as a communication tool to (as the site intends) broadcast their ideas to other users. However the casual users who flocked to the site may be less enamoured with a “clean” Youtube. Whether it was worth $1.65 billion on Friday was highly questionable; whether it is still worth that this week is extremely doubtful. Google must have known this was coming, but as to their plan we can only wait and see.
Both new browsers have been incredibly well received with Internet Explorer clocking up 3 million downloads in 2 days and Firefox hitting 2 million after just 24 hours. I realised that I had forgotten to discuss one of my favourite IE features, the zoom function. Unlike the Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine, IE now supports true pagezoom like Opera, enlarging all elements of the page and not merely increasing text size. This avoids breaking the layout of a page no matter how large you make it.
One of Firefox’s most popular extensions add-ons has always been Adblock and while I certainly recommend using it, I would remind people to use it courteously. By this I mean that for general browsing it is fine to wish not to be bombarded with ads, but if you regularly visit a site and wish to support it (like this one!) please disable Adblock for the site. Just click on the arrow next to the Adblock logo and select “Disable on [domain]”. This assumes they are using an unintrusive form of advertising, of course — anyone using flashing banners or pop-ups is fair game in my book!
Universal, having asked Firefly fans (known as the Browncoats) to help with marketing and publicising the film Serenity, have now stabbed many in the back by claiming copyright infringement, closing down fan stores and demanding licensing fees. In retaliation, the fans decided to compile an invoice for their services…
31 October 2006 at 5:39 pm
I couldn’t believe they shut the Firefly fan sites down. I was going to get a Blue Sun t-shirt as well but I thought I’d wait till I got back to Cambridge so it’d get delivered here and my mum wouldn’t be appalled at me buying stuff off the internet (she’s strange). And then I got here and the site had been shut down and they weren’t taking any more orders. :((
Yeah, so if anyone knows where I can get one…
1 November 2006 at 2:56 pm
:o:o:o:o:o:o
:((
Bastards.