A story at Venture Beat about Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube has this interesting piece of comment about what created the tipping point for YouTube:

The site’s founders suffered at first; they couldn’t get pretty girls to post videos, despite offering payment. But the site’s three co-founders hit the winning recipe in June 2005, Karim explains, when they added four features that instigated viral growth: 1) related video recommendations, 2) one-click emailing to spam a friend about a video, 3) more social networking and user interaction tools like video comments, and 4) an external video player.

What does it all mean?

In this video Donald Rumsfeld clearly talks about the flight over Pennsylvania being shot down.

Check it out:

The One Minute World team went over to Balmain today to have their picture taken by the Fin Review for a story later this week...

The idea was to get Will to replicate the logo on the public graffitti wall in Donnelly St. But the neighbours apparently didn't know that this is one of those areas where artists are actually allowed to be expressive, and had called the local police....

I am not sure whether the fact that there was a photographer from a newspaper there had anything to do with it, but the police were very nice and let everyone get on with what they were doing.

Here is Will painting the logo and the One Minute World team: Will, Ian and Yvette.

Great article in the American Conservative magazine about why Bush is NOT like Churchill - and quotes an anecdote about historian, John Lukacs....

John Lukacs, whose book Giuliani was reading around 9/11—the mayor actually carried the book with him, at least when television cameras were around—knows quite a lot about Churchill and in an interview with Newsweek, ten days after the 9/11 attack, made it clear that no, Mr. Mayor, you’re not Churchill, Osama bin Laden is not Adolf Hitler, and the war on terrorism is not World War II. “I’m very pleased that Mayor Giuliani held up my book. That was very pleasant,” Lukacs, an old-world-style gentleman, told Newsweek. “But I don’t think there are any parallels. This crisis we now face, no matter what the president says, is not a war. It’s not the first war of the 21st century. A war is something between nations or states or sometimes even tribes. Who are we going to declare war on?” Declaring “war on terrorism” was “just rhetoric,” Lukacs explained. “But aren’t there parallels between what Churchill was facing as a leader and what George W. Bush was now facing?” the magazine interviewer insisted. And how about the way George W. Bush was carrying himself? Doesn’t he have the stature of a Churchill? Bush and Churchill “are very different personalities,” the Hungarian-born historian, who lived in Europe during World War II, patiently noted. “And this is really not the time to criticize a president, but neither his capacity nor his character is comparable. And character is what counts. Intellect without character is not worth anything.” Ouch.

I was reading about the war of words between Ze Frank and Rocketboom on whose numbers are correct and who is getting the biggest audience or the biggest amount of ads....

This is like the old days of radio or TV arguing who has the biggest audience, who has the most influential audience etc but on a micro scale.

By the way, on this topic the One Minute World website went live over the weekend, and now you can see the back catalogue of episodes. Still very early days.... but have a look at how this is developing... I really like the 'dating' episodes.... interesting social commentary on the changing times we live in!

Very interesting thought on Fred Wilson's blog.... about 'networks of networks'. I have thought about this quite a bit recently. But Fred sums it up nicely with an interesting example:

But a funny thing happened. I had about 450 members yesterday morning. I now have 510 members. I haven't added 60 members in a single day since the day I put the reader roll on my blog.

One of two things is happening. My post on MyBlogLog yesterday got more people to sign up (certainly a part of it) or the people joining at Techcrunch and elsewhere in the past day are also joining my community.

If the latter is a significant part of why this happened, then it points to the fact that networks of networks are a powerful community building tool.

This is a significant thought.... perhaps it is a meme in and of itself?

Andy Borowitz shows that satire is alive and well in America....This is from a recent piece in Newsweek:

"To Kim Jong-Il, let me say this," Bush said.  "Abandon your nuclear program at once, or you will face the full fury of the United States of America's harshest rhetoric."

At the Pentagon, officials said the President was mulling a series of options to punish North Korea, including a tactical speech lasting ten to fifteen minutes or a more devastating verbal assault that could last up to an hour.

Later in the day, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that President Bush had conducted a test of his "meanest speech ever" in front of the White House staff and that the speech had been "totally successful."

"In his speech, the President called Kim Jong-Il 'evil,' 'wicked,' 'immoral' and 'iniquitous,'" Snow said.  "The message is clear: the United States has a thesaurus and we're not afraid to use it."

I have just finished reading Underground by Miles Franklin Award winning author, Andrew McGahan. An absolutely blistering read that anyone who is interested in current affairs, loves black comedy and a ripping yarn should read.

Here is an excerpt that I happen to like because I have met several of the ex Prime Ministers referred to in this paragraph.... But the action is not about these guys. It is set in the near future. And boy, is it dark!

Interesting and insightful post at Prelinger about YouTube and open access to archives....

We are indeed in the early stages of massive social change. Some of that change will come as a result of the way that we have to learn to adapt to social change that comes as a result of environment and economic change (as noted in the post below). But the accelerator for that change has to be as a result of growing access to information archives.

First it was text. Now it is video. As the world's supply of content is posted on line whether it is at YouTube or elsewhere frankly doesn't matter. More efficient ways to create metadata will emerge, and hopefully will take us past the dreadful techno jargon that we have, so that ordinary non-technical people will be able to insert the appropriate tags as producers and as users....

The more the archives of content are opened the more people will access them. This long tail is going to be really interesting to watch emerge!