WILLisms.com: Trivia Tidbit Of The Day: Part 333 -- Google, YouTube, & The Internets.

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Trivia Tidbit Of The Day: Part 333 -- Google, YouTube, & The Internets.

Googly McGoogleton-

Google is winning the internet search engine wars:

Or are they?

In some ways, Google may already be too big for its britches.

Indeed, there was that whole censoring themselves for China thing. Also, that whole digitized book fiasco.

...just to name a couple of the more high profile google controversies.

Google's peripheral products are hit or miss. Gmail is awesome, for example. Google News was good for a while, before it allowed so many weirdo blog sites to appear in its lineup (incidentally, they've rejected WILLisms.com two or three times, even while including some very questionable sites).

Google Video, meanwhile, is just dreadfully terrible.

Last summer, when investigating the Iranian presidential election taking place on American soil, I uploaded the video to Google Video. It took weeks for the video to appear, ready to show. I guess it had to pass through the Google censors. And then, even though it was far too late to use the video, there was no way to embed the video within a blog post.

Irritating.

More recently, I tried uploading this video, showing Democrats applauding their own ridiculousness on Social Security at the 2006 State of the Union (as seen in this post) to the Google video service.

After several days of limbo, it was finally rejected, presumably because of the Fox News logo in the corner of the video.

Now, I understand copyright concerns, but the clip clearly falls under fair use rules. It is a short clip from a lengthy public event carried by several networks. The purpose of the clip is political speech, including criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research (all fair use purposes). Moreover, the brief clip does no harm to Fox News. If anything, it promotes the watching of Fox News.

Anyway, after the belated rejection from Google Video, I turned to YouTube.com instead.

YouTube.com is so much better, it's not even funny.

And its awesomeness has helped it eclipse the vile Google Video, in terms of traffic, in an extremely short period of time. YouTube.com, after just a few months of existence, now has more than 4 times the traffic that Google Video has. And while Alexa doesn't allow you to filter out video.google.com from the main google.com regime, let's use the master of blog traffic, Instapundit.com and some other well-known websites as vehicles for comparison:

YouTube is a perfect example of why competition is so important. Google is great for a lot of things, but it doesn't own the internet. Nor should it.

Indeed, using YouTube.com, it took me 14 seconds to find this video of the Walker, Texas Ranger theme song and embed it into this post:

And that right there is what makes America-- and the internet-- great.

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Previous Trivia Tidbit: Inflation Is Awesomely Awesome.

Posted by Will Franklin · 16 May 2006 05:05 PM

Comments

Not only that, but Youtube gives you a volume adjustment control.

Judging by past history, how long will it be before Google tries to buy YouTube?

Posted by: Jay Tea at May 16, 2006 05:11 PM

You are right Will, gmail is excellent (and thank you for suggesting it).

But . . . surely there is a better use for YouTube than WALKER TEXAS RANGER???????????

Posted by: Ken McCracken at May 16, 2006 06:04 PM

Such as...

Posted by: Will Franklin at May 16, 2006 09:08 PM

Um . . .

Okay you got me there.

But still.

Posted by: Ken McCracken at May 16, 2006 09:09 PM

O the eyes of the Ranger are upon you, any wrong you do, he's gonna see; when you're in Texas look behind you, cause that's where the Ranger's gonna be....

Posted by: Zsa Zsa at May 16, 2006 09:11 PM

Yes! That's where the Ranger's gonna be.....

Posted by: Zsa Zsa at May 16, 2006 09:14 PM

Actually, a future Heidi update (which are going to end in a few weeks, at the end of June, most likely, unless there's a "draft Heidi update" movement) may feature a YouTube.com clip of Heidi.

Posted by: Will Franklin at May 16, 2006 09:14 PM

Incidentally, I met Noble Willingham in 2000 while working for the Bush campaign. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in East Texas as a Republican against an incumbent (can't remember who). Noble Willingham (C.D. Parker, on the show) also passed away in real life recently.

Posted by: Will Franklin at May 16, 2006 09:18 PM

I wasn't sure who Willingham was, so I looked him up. Yeah, that is a familiar face.

Great idea about Tubing Heidi.

Posted by: Ken McCracken at May 16, 2006 09:41 PM

See, that is what YouTube is for.

Posted by: Ken McCracken at May 16, 2006 09:41 PM

Ken, when Chuck Norris sees what you wrote, your life will end.

On the bright side, it will probably be fairly painless.

Posted by: Hoodlumman at May 17, 2006 12:02 AM

I love the way that Google rails against evil corporations and has the do no evil motto, yet they are a corporation and are the f*ing Walmart of the Internet. Walmart is evil for having too much control and destroying other mom and pop operations, yet Google is not for crushing mom and pop search engines? What the hell is Jeeves going to do when people stop asking him? Same thing moms and pops do when Walmart puts them out of Business.

Just think of Jeeves for a minute, OK. Just think of Jeeves.

Posted by: Justin B at May 17, 2006 10:29 PM

I hold my nose while using three of their products, Gmail, GoogleEarth, and Picasa2. Can't think of another group of loonies doing so well in a free market while preaching against others doing the same. Typical limo lefties.

Posted by: Eneils Bailey at May 18, 2006 04:03 PM