Memex 1.1

It’s that time of year again — the world’s bosses have gathered in Davos to do some schmoozing and pretend they have social consciences. Bill Gates delivered his plea for a kinder, gentler capitalism*, for example, which is bit like hoping that wild boars will learn to respect suburban flower-beds.

Needless to say, the Google boys are there — and there’s a substantial YouTube presence as a result. See, for example, the Davos question where the fat cats post their answers to the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies and individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”.

*Footnote: latest kinder, gentler capitalist results. Microsoft sales up 30%, profits up 79%.

Yep — according to TechCrunch…

The University of California Berkeley has started uploading video recordings of course lectures on to YouTube.

The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube…

Here’s Sergey Brin’s lecture on search engines.

Later: Tony Hirst’s built a neat little search engine for the Berkeley shows.

Sean French pointed me to this:

Like him, I’m baffled by how anyone could have such an encyclopedic knowledge of film. This is not the kind of stuff you find by Googling.

More… Quentin (like Sean, a movie buff) writes: ” I wonder if somebody had access to the close-caption text transcripts for a large movie library - you could search that…”

It’s amazing what you find on YouTube. Here’s an interview with Jurgen Habermas.

Thanks to Michael for spotting it! Great Q&A session, btw.

If you want more, why not try the PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address?

If you like Heath-Robinson, you’ll love this.

Interesting NYT report…

ON YouTube, copyrighted video clips of movies and TV shows are far less popular compared with noncopyrighted material than previously thought, according to a new study.

On their face, the results could have serious implications for YouTube’s owner, Google, and the media companies, most notably Viacom, with which it has been negotiating. But not everyone agrees.

Vidmeter, which tracks the online video business, determined that the clips that were removed for copyright violations — most of them copyrighted by big media companies — comprise just 9 percent of all videos on the site. Even more surprising, the videos that have been removed make up just 6 percent of the total views (vidmeter.com).

The Vidmeter report is here.

Hmmm… New Labour has decided that it must “use” the “YouTube channel”. Somehow, I don’t think it’ll catch on. Especially when it’s up against stuff like this.

(Answer: when he’s Rupert Murdoch.) This morning’s Observer column…

Tom Anderson, the founder of MySpace, had - as of 9.42am on Friday 30 March - 167,144,385 ‘friends’. This is not because he is exceedingly sociable, but because anyone who signs up on MySpace automatically becomes one of Tom’s friends. By the time you read this, he will have another 500,000. (MySpace is adding 250,000 users a day.)

The MySpace concept of a friend may seem contrived, but is much closer to what a businessperson would describe as a ‘contact’. This may be why the corporate world is gazing anxiously at the social networking phenomenon and wondering if it has anything to offer. Two studies - by Forrester Research, a market research firm, and McKinsey, a consultancy - offer conflicting views…