August 2008 Archives

I first heard of the Amethyst Initiative on the way to work this morning, and later found it on Yahoo! via Reditt.

If you haven't heard of it, essentially the initiative addresses the notion that the policy of allowing people to drink ( legally ) once they are 21 years old does not reflect the reality of today's society. The initiative has quite a few signatures. The signatures are representative of a lot of well-known colleges and universities across the US.

However, groups such as M.A.D.D. are openly against the initiative primarily because they believe reducing the age will lead in more teen deaths.

Quite honestly, I can say that I cannot understand why kids as young as 18 can be shipped off to Iraq, have a rifle thrown into their hands and expected to take lives, but yet, cannot sit down in a bar and have a beer.

On the other hand, having gone to college and experienced the social expectation that is prevalent on many campuses - that if you should attend a party you are expected to consume vast quantities of alcohol; that sporting a hangover at your 8 AM class is akin to a badge of honor; that it is cool to be majorly fucked up beyond all recognition; that it is a rite of passage one must accomplish and then decide that it's really quite stupid before they hit bottom or become lifetime alcoholics.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so cool to be fucked up it it wasn't portrayed as cool in movies about college life. It is as obligatory a scene in most college-themed movies to have a scene with underage kids drinking at the most awesome party of the year as it is to have hot coeds romping topless in any other scene. 

In other words - it's our culture stupid.

I've often wondered if this specific case would ever eventually come up. Consider, for a moment, that you are a user at some kind of social content website like YouTube, Flickr or some other. You faithfully upload content that you produce. Somehow or another, the website figures out a way to make money.

Shouldn't you share in that success? Somehow? Someway?

One of the users at YouTube, who applied to YouTube's partner program but was denied, is not exceptionally happy about the outcome. Apparently he has some videos on YouTube and they get pretty good traffic. Ever since YouTube decided to share some of the ad revenue with popular, traffic-generating users, it is possible that people can start getting something back for being a contributing member - if you're selected to be one of the "partners."

Since he was denied a partnership, he is suing Google ( since they purchased YouTube ) and believes he is entitled to some sort of compensation.

I see two sides to this:

First off, social sites like YouTube and Flickr ( to name just a couple ), I believe should give something back. Google paid 1.5 BILLION dollars. They didn't just buy the software and hardware, they bought YouTube for it's popularity. The members of the site ( through their contributions of content ) made the site as popular as it is. Of course, figuring out exactly how the members should be compensated is yet another matter even though using traffic to particular viewings of a specific video is a good place to start.

On the other hand: The people that built YouTube had the foresight and the know-how to build the software, make it scale and promote it in order for it to be as successful as it is. It isn't as if there are no other options to upload and view video on the web.

Either way, it should be an interesting case that ultimately could change the social content sites that we know now.

I finished changing stuff on the ol' blog. Which, I must say is really kind of ironic since I haven't posted anything since . . . uh . . . a long time.

So anyways go ahead and look around at the new look. I haven't tested it with Safari, IE or Opera yet so we'll see how that goes later.

Still a bit of work to do on the archives and About page - so bear with me, I'll be filling them in as I get back into the swing of things. My goal is to get back to a regular posting schedule first.