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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Randy Pausch, the popular computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon whose appetite for life was only sharpened by a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer in September 2006, has died.

Pausch’s inspirational “Last Lecture” a year later, titled “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” was posted to YouTube and became an unexpected sensation, viewed millions of times. It evolved into a best-selling book, and Pausch used his sudden celebrity to be an advocate for both cancer research and savoring life. Randy Pausch died this morning at his home. He was 47. In the “Last Lecture,” he said, “I mean I don’t know how to not have fun. I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it. You just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think I’m clear where I stand on the great Tigger/Eeyore debate. Never lose the childlike wonder. It’s just too important. It’s what drives us.”

In his Manitoba lecture, Mike Wesch mentioned a survey which suggested that 88% of the material on YouTube was original, not the copyrighted stuff the mainstream media (and Viacom) obsesses about. Here’s a great example of creative use of the platform. It’s the second of a series of four short movies about the creepier implications of Google Street View.

Thanks to Tony Hirst for spotting it.

Well, maybe…

Viacom has “backed off” from demands to divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched a video on YouTube, the website has claimed.

Google had been ordered to provide personal details of millions of YouTube users to help Viacom prepare its case on alleged copyright infringement…

En passant, I think I heard Mike Wesch say in his Manitoba lecture that a suvery he and his students did found that 88% of the stuff on YouTube is original material — i.e. not copyright-infringing.

Rory Cellan-Jones has an uneasy feeling.

The YouTube case seems to show that, despite those promises, we have no real control over our data once it is lodged on a corporate server. Every detail of my viewing activities over the years - the times I’ve watched videos in the office, the clips of colleagues making idiots of themselves, the unauthorised clip of goals from a Premier League game - is contained in those YouTube logs.

All to be handed over to Viacom’s lawyers on a few “over-the-shelf four-terabyte hard drives”, according to the New York judge who made the ruling. I may protest that I am a British citizen and that the judge has no business giving some foreign company a window on my world. No use - my data is in California, and it belongs to Google, not me.

The other troubling aspect about this case was that it was only the blogs that seemed to understand the significance of the ruling when it emerged on Wednesday night. Much of the mainstream media ignored it at first, seeming to regard it as a victory for Google, because the judge said the search firm didn’t have to reveal its source code.

“I’ve never worried too much about the threat to my privacy”, Rory continues.

I’m relaxed about appearing on CCTV, happy enough for my data to be used for marketing purposes, as long as I’ve ticked a box, and have never really cared that Google knows about every search I’ve done for the last 18 months. But suddenly I’m feeling a little less confident. How about you?

One of the most intriguing things about YouTube is that it isn’t over-run by porn. I’ve often wondered why — after all, every other unmoderated publishing opportunity on the Net seems to have succumbed. This thoughtful piece in the NYT explains that YouTube’s founders shrewdly anticipated the danger and installed sophisticated filtering software that spots and refuses porn — with interesting effects.

By keeping obscenity in check, YouTube teems with video of near infinite variety, stuff that thrives when pornography, which is hard to contain once it takes root, has been banished. YouTube risked losing millions of viewers when it made rules against pornography. But it has gained radical variety, the kind that defines the most robust ecosystems. YouTube’s dizzying diversity, in fact, now makes online porn sites that purport to cater to a broad range of tastes look only obsessive and redundant…

This is truly — as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center put it — one of those “I told you so” moments.

For every video on YouTube, the judge required Google to turn over to Viacom the login name of every user who had watched it, and the address of their computer, known as an I.P. or Internet protocol address.

Both companies have argued that I.P. addresses alone cannot be used to unmask the identities of individuals with certainty. But in many cases, technology experts and others have been able to link I.P. addresses to individuals using other records of their online activities.

The amount of data covered by the order is staggering, as it includes every video watched on YouTube since its founding in 2005. In April alone, 82 million people in the United States watched 4.1 billion clips there, according to comScore. Some experts say virtually every Internet user has visited YouTube.

Of course Viacom swears blind that the only people who will have access to this information are its lawyers (who are working on its $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google). But it brings one up sharply against the implications of cloud computing.

For those who can’t abide the whole social networking thing.

From ZDNet…

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

“The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. “We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,” he said.

He claimed that the “unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic” would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,” he said…

Looks like Flickr is thinking of taking on YouTube. If so, big mistake.

Sobering film by Mike Wesch and the students of his cultural anthropology class at Kansas State.