Roger Benningfield

I gave up on Comic Zeal a looong time ago. I stepped up to the expensive-but-worth-every-penny Comic Reader Mobi... it's not as pretty as CZ, but it does one thing that no other app does: intelligently zooms captions and speech bubbles. I've tried everything from CZ's standard zoom-and-pan to Comixology's panel-at-a-time approach to reading comics on a small screen, and CRM's "zoom the text and leave everything else in place" method is infinitely more satisfying.

My strumbar was flakey from the start, and the downstrum became extremely unpredictable after the three hour mark.(At one point, it stopped responding entirely.) I've switched over to my Les Paul now, and the Strat is only used for playing bass.

Ashwin: Those are the kinds of anti-YouTube arguments that I hope will go away.

Most of the pirated content on YouTube isn't owned by creative people... it's owned by corporate drones and their stockholders. Actual creative people generally benefit from their exposure on the 'Tube, since it increases their visibility. That doesn't mean that they aren't damaged indirectly, if we assume that YouTube has a tangible impact on corporate profits that are used to pay creatives. But (a) that assumption is pretty shaky, and (b) it's a significantly more nuanced situation than the one you've proposed.

In fact, there's an entire class of low-budget, unknown, disconnected creative types whose futures depend upon YouTube. All that traffic, legit or not, gives them an opening they'd never have otherwise. The audience can come for the Stephen Colbert clips, and stay for the rest.

Hm... okay, this is an anti-YouTube argument that actually makes sense to me. I'm not sure I agree, but there's a strong, logical basis for debate there. The Rapidshare compare/contrast actually has the potential to take this discussion to a higher level.

A few thoughts:

(1)"Google could be a good corporate citizen and make sure they have permission from the copyright owner before a video is posted."

Yeah, and Mark could be a good citizen and make sure I have permission to post this comment. But he won't... and he shouldn't. It's impractical, and ultimately pointless.

Speaking as one of those "tiny copyright holders", I've already seen what a pain proactive copyright policing can be. I shot a music video for a band last summer, and spent time seeding it on the various sharing sites. But the video never made it to Metacafe, because someone decided that it was pirated. To get the flag removed meant jumping through hoops and talking to a half dozen people. All because I uploaded something I owned, that I wanted distributed.

(2) "They feel they have the legal right to tell every person who makes a living based on their creative efforts that they have to do business the Gootube way..."

I don't think that's the message at all. Those of us trying to make a living from creative efforts must realize that we're going to have to do business the Web way, which means a loss of centralized control. Nothing here is unique to Google, YouTube, or even video.

The aspects of the web that make it easy for small players like me to get our stuff in front of people are the same aspects that make piracy easy. I've just gotta suck that up and accept it as a cost of doing business in the first place.

For what it's worth, individual TV episodes don't expire... they're purchases. You can even delete and re-download them, which is handy considering that 360 owners are still stuck with a 20GB hard drive.

Jim: I basically agree with your position, but would strongly encourage you to reconsider the particulars of your opt-out scheme. Instead of asking publishers to email you, just look at each site's robots.txt and see if your user-agent is disallowed... if it is, drop the feed. (And make sure you publish the name of your user-agent somewhere that folks can easily find.)

"So in the Land of the Rising Sun, used panty vending machines are a welcome convenience, but splattered brains are out of bounds. Makes sense."

Well, if you think about it... yeah, it does.

Unless Videora recently slipped an update into the 0.81 version without changing the version number, it doesn't convert anything to WMV. The only options I see are for MPEG1/2, which are pretty useless on the 360... you can view 'em, but you can't FF/rewind, and even on my wired network, "chapter skipping" results in network congestion and a locked-up 360 about 75% of the time.

Honestly, I'm about *this* close to just giving up on the extender side of the 360 and moving the Media Center to the living room.

"...what current lists are basically saying are the most popular blogs." Marc: No one is interested in "most popular". That represents a pre-web way of thinking that leads us straight down the sinkhole from which we're struggling to emerge. Popularity is not only a poor indicator of quality, it actually *precludes* quality in many cases. And make no mistake; what people want is the freshest, highest quality stuff. *Before* it gets a chance to become popular and mediocre. What most link-tracking systems (like Google, Technorati, etc.) are doing is searching for quality by first seeking to establish authority. The problem with their method is that links were never meant to convey anything more than, well... linkage. The ultimate meaning of <a href="http://foo.com/">Foo Corp</a> is simply "here's a link to Foo Corp." Trying to layer assumptions about quality atop such a simple statement is where things go off the rails. So if Icerocket wants to innovate, you need to look for ways to recognize quality *before there are any links to it*. The search engine that can spot a trend before it actually becomes one will be the next Google.