Julianna Yau’s blog

EeeUser.com picked up on the announcement of the Cloudbook by Everex. It looks like the XO laptop has been successful in creating market demand for ultracompact laptops/notebooks/whateveryouwantocallthems and I need to face the fact that whatever I buy now will become obsolete next year.

After a bit of browsing through different options for video hosting, I decided to use DivShare, which is the host I use for the Facebook Privacy Primer I wrote (which will be updated when the finally release the friend list privacy options).

I chose against most other YouTube wannabes because I wanted a host, and not a social network. And, of course, I chose against YouTube because trying to get help was like chasing down a lion before pulling its teeth. DivShare actually lets you contact a real, live person through email or a contact form on their website! I wanted to clarify that I still retain copyrights to anything I upload (provided I was the original copyright owner), and got a response the next day confirming that is the case (their TOU does not speak to that directly).

They have the option of converting almost anything uploaded into Flash, which is nice.

I uploaded two files today, both just over 30MB, which took around 9 minutes each. I’m not sure how that compares to YouTube, but it seems reasonable to me. According to the calculations/numbers in this review, it would have taken a half hour on YouTube…but I’m not sure if the upload times have improved since those numbers were provided (and can’t find a time stamp on the article).

After each video was uploaded, I received the following message:

We’re converting your video!
The file you uploaded has been recognized as a video, and we’re now converting it to a DivShare Flash Video so you can watch it on the download page and embed it on your site. The process will take a few minutes, and we’ll e-mail you when it’s done. You can also download the original file at any time.

I’m not sure what “a few minutes” is, but am not holding my breath, considering the size of the video. I’ll have to adjust my camera settings so the videos aren’t so big in the future. I’ll post conversion times later. I love that they had the foresight to build the email notification for the conversion completion!

Update Jan 10, 2008: Flash conversion took approx. 4 hours for those videos, and I received an email with the notification, a link to the Flash-converted file, and their support email address so I can contact them for questions.

The Washington Post has a surprisingly balanced article which discusses cases of corporate copyright infringement. This is the under-reported flip-side to all of the cases where users are uploading/sharing corporately-owned intellectual/creative property. Big companies still have an advantage in these cases because they can blame interns and buy off negative press and law suits with what’s pocket change for them. IMO, the company is responsible for not properly educating their interns on copyright if those interns are being asked to harvest images for company use.

I’m adding this to my deconstruction of copyright later.

Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link (via the Social Media group on Ma.gnolia)!