GodTube

ABC recently discovered GodTube. I've known about GodTube for awhile. To be honest, I don't watch many videos on GodTube--I really don't have time. What I like about GodTube, as opposed to YouTube, is that you have a pretty good idea going into it what you're getting. Granted, GodTube is a copy of YouTube, but with religious overtones. It's like somebody looked at YouTube and said, this would make a great tool for Christians if only it were run by Christian people. It's pretty obvious that it isn't run by Christians--and that's not necessarily bad; if the only businesses allowed to operate were Christian-run businesses, we would be in trouble. YouTube has a long history of, well, interesting ethical choices. They have a policy that they will not allow copyrighted content on their site, however, they have, until recently, put the onus of copyright protection on their contributors and the owners of said copyright. In other words, you aren't supposed to post content to their site unless you own the rights to it--and their terms of use page spells out exactly how you can tell if you own the rights or not, but if you do, they don't really check, but if someone else complains that they own the copyright, YouTube will take the video off their site. As an example, a video was posted on YouTube several months ago that met the criteria for original content, but a TV show about internet video used the video on their show (without permission from the producer of said video). The producer video'd the TV program that featured his video, and posted the video on YouTube, in place of his original video, including on-air comments about his video. The network informed YouTube that they owned the copyright, and YouTube took down the video. The original producer tried to make the case that they used his video without permission, but that really didn't fly--it's not like he was collecting royalties from YouTube.

More than that, though, YouTube has a policy that they will not host material that is deemed offensive. Experience has taught us that what we consider to be offensive isn't necessarily what YouTube considers offensive. There are many videos on YouTube that would not be rated PG in by the MPAA. More than that, there are a number of videos that criticize various religions or ethnic groups. Some of these are taken down very quickly, others stay put for years. Generally, if it is anti-Christian or anti-Semitic, it is deemed to be non-offensive. If it is critical of Islam, it is removed quickly; even if it is clear that it is only critical of terrorists groups as opposed to Islam as a whole. Perhaps that is because Jews and Christians don't have a history of flying airplanes into buildings. Don't misunderstand me, I am well aware that most Muslims are very peaceful people. I know that. I know that the vast majority of Muslims who have immigrated to this country are here because they are trying to get away from the extremists who sponsor terror. I mean those people no ill-will. My point is, simply, that YouTube clearly is more concerned about offending the terrorists than they are the vast majority of their users. To be honest, I can somewhat understand. They offend me, I quit using their site. They have lost one user. This will have a fairly negligible effect on their advertising revenue. They offend some terrorist group, they may get some of their people killed. There is also the concern that the terrorists may not target YouTube, but the producers of the video, but leaving the operators of YouTube with some sense of responsibility (or not--some people are quite immune to such things, but I would like to think that they would feel some responsibility). There is a certain wisdom to the way YouTube operates. The thing is, if I go to YouTube, and click on 'humor,' I may get a video that will make me laugh, or I may get some pop-tart showing me things that I don't really need to see, or some bigot making jokes about the Holocaust...

Granted, the videos at GodTube mostly leave me disappointed. Some of them are funny. Some of them are thought-provoking. A lot of them take a great concept and use wooden acting, bad camera angles and poor scripting to just, I don't know how to describe it--it's like instead of taking a photograph of a beautiful sunset, you sit down and paint it using watercolors on graph paper in the rain (I suppose if you don't have a camera or canvas or a dry spot to paint, that's the best you can do).

It's been pointed out that GodTube is a little embarrassing. It's such an obvious copy. The site could have been designed a lot better. Most of the videos could be a lot better. Some of them are just plain stupid. But they are clean. They are not offensive (well, not usually, anyway, and not offensive in the sense that they are showing things they ought not, or expressing opinions that offend--sometimes they are offensively stupid, but that's about it). One of my personal favorite videos on GodTube is called, "Baby Got Book." It's a take-off of a secular music video, but this guy talks (sings?) about how he likes women with (big) Bibles. I've watched it several times and I still get a chuckle out of it. One of my least favorite is one that calls the banana an atheist's worst nightmare--although, to be honest, that one is stupid enough to be funny, even though it clearly wasn't intended as humor.

So, the question is, do I watch YouTube, and risk being offended at what I see, or watch GodTube, and risk being disappointed? Or just stay busy with other things, and not worry about it...

Time Wasters

BBC has an interesting article about Facebook causing lost productivity in the office. I'm not sure why they pick on Facebook, as opposed to MySpace or YouTube... The point is, if you have internet access, then there will be those workers who spend too much of their workday online. It's easy to say that I only go online when I'm on break or during my lunch hour, but ten minutes spent online easily turns into 15, then 20, etc.

We had a situation where I work a few years ago where several computers were networked together (but not connected to the internet) for a project that several of us were working on. One of us, who was a 'gamer' brought in a multi-player first person shooter game, so that different people, at different computers, could enter the game on the LAN and play as a team, or against the other player(s). He got permission for us to play during lunch. It didn't take long before people started coming to 'a good stopping place' a few minutes before lunch, and playing the game. Then people wanted to 'finish this level' at the end of lunch, before going back to work. Soon, lunch was taking about three hours. When our supervisor came to realize this, the game was hastily removed from the LAN. One can hardly blame him.

Now, we have no games loaded on out computers (not even solitaire), and, although we have internet access; Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, HoTMaiL, Yahoo Mail, G Mail and a host of other time-wasters are blocked. Again, this is somewhat understandable. There are a number of web-sites out there that claim to 'proxy' (or, essentially, redirect web pages) so that blocked pages can be viewed anyway, but our IT guys seem to find out about these sites quicker than the rest of us, and block them, too. Again, not really surprising. The bosses claim that it isn't so much lost productivity as it is expensive bandwidth: If I'm doing legitimate research on the net, but somebody else is hogging bandwidth by watching YouTube videos, then it takes me much longer to do my job; but if they pay for an internet connection that would allow all of us to watch YouTube videos without affecting anyone else, then that gets expensive.

Quite frankly, although I feel employers have a right to limit what employees can access on company computers and even employees' computers hooked up to the company's network, people were wasting time at work long before there was an internet. As a matter of fact, one of the early internet time-wasters was called watercooler.com, because it was an online version of the old stereotype of employees gathering at the water cooler to chit-chat. The problem with watercooler.com was that employees could 'gather at the water cooler' without leaving their cubicles.

Names, Bridges, and Other Oddities

I realize that some parents try to come up with unique names for their children--nobody wants to call, "Hey, John!" at the playground and have forty seven kids come running--but this one has to make me wonder, are you 4real?

By now, everyone has heard about the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, but I wanted to include some links to the news. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, the Chicago Tribune , and the BBC. One of these things is not like the others... Also, Forbes reports that the state of Minnesote is putting the rebuilding project on the fast track-they hope to have it completed by the end of next year.

Al Sharpton has made a very reasonable demand...

A man was fished out of the sea at the Dutch resort of Zandvoort on Tuesday. I haven't figured out what "No Real Than You Are" means (of course, I'm still working on, "All your base are belong to us").

The Washington Times reports that Imam Didmar Faja (one of the Imams involved in a lawsuit against airline passengers who reported 'suspicious activity' by the Imams) has been attacked by someone throwing an 'acid bomb.' Apparently, someone driving by threw a pop-bottle filled with pool cleaner and aluminum foil at the Imam, who was standing outside of the Albanian American Islamic Center of Arizona at the time. They also note that they had no explanation as to why Imam Didmar Faja was standing on the sidewalk at 1:00 AM--three and a half hours before morning prayer. Of course, no one is suggesting anything nefarious about his being there (I can think of a number of reasons why he might have been there: He may have stayed late to finish up some paperwork and was just leaving, he may have had a late prayer, he may have had a meeting with other staff members that just ran really late--to be honest, I don't think that the journalist thought to ask that at the time), but, if the 'acid bomb' was directed specifically at him, how did his attackers know that he would be there? Is this part of his normal routine, or did they just happen to see him there, and happened to have in the car an empty pop-bottle, some pool-cleaning fluid, and aluminum foil, and said, "Hey, there's that trouble-making Imam who filed that lawsuit, let's pour some of this into there and see if we can throw it and splash some on him." I don't know; it sounds like kind of a stretch to me. I suppose it's possible, but I have to think that it was more like a couple of teenagers who had seen too many Mentos in Diet Coke videos on YouTube, and decided to try something similar. They probably set the thing up, but then had a limited amount of time to toss the thing, came around the corner, not expecting anybody to be standing there; probably didn't even notice him until after they threw it... Of course, being involved in the sort of legal action that he is, I can certainly understand his belief that this attack must be linked to the lawsuit. He probably has received threats because of it; there are a lot of crazies around. All in all, it seems like a lot of much ado about nothing, but the police are investigating it as a hate crime. The good news is, no one was hurt in the incident.