YouTube has been everyone’s favorite soap box for quite some time now. For anyone who lives in a country where TV programs are just painful to watch, YouTube is such a lifesaver. Not only is it a great source of information and misinformation, it’s also a practical platform for citizen journalism. It has been so effective in its instant gratification, and so convincing in its democracy, that we almost forget that our worshiped soap box is still controlled by a corporation that has its own interest to look out for. Not every video is treated equal. Sure, it can’t prevent you from getting on the soap box, but it can give you a defect megaphone; it can’t tell the pedestrians to go away, but it can employ warm bodies to pose as bystanders to block you from view.
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Popularity: 51%
March 21st, 2008
Posted by
em8chel <<
a site for sore eyes, geek pride >>
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UPDATE (05/23/08)
I tried to leave a comment on xenutv2 but kept getting an error message.
UPDATE (05/22/08)
Last week I asked Google and YouTube press support (and another Google employee) whether their Scientology channel was paid. The channel was listed in the “Sponsors” section of the site, for one thing, and Scientology has been seen spending many advertising dollars with Google in AdSense campaigns. One reason why I asked was that the page included a link to Scientology.org without “nofollow” – which would make it a paid link, which would be against Google’s own webmaster guidelines…
UPDATE (05/21/08)
It seems that YouTube has one set of rules for The Church of Scientology and another set for Scientology’s critics…
UPDATE (03/28/08)
This screenshot was taken yesterday. A search on video.google.com for “scientology” came up with nothing. Hit the search button, the same thing. Hit the search button, the same thing again. The search finally found the videos I was looking for the 4th time I hit the search button.
UPDATE (03/24/08): watch how all videos critical of Scientology are frozen (with one mysterious exception of the second segment of “The S Files”, which YouTube held hostage for some 29 hours after the upload before releasing it online), while all non-Scientology related videos play just fine.
UPDATE (03/16/08): Scientology has relaunched its websites and uploaded its own self-produced videos of propaganda and deception. Interesting coincidence?
screenshot 1:(click on the pictures to see them in original size):This is just a one time thing that happened last month. Technical glitch on YouTube? I had no problems searching other key words though.
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Popularity: 95%
March 14th, 2008
Posted by
em8chel <<
bruising my religion, party like it's 1984 >>
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updates at the end of the article.
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We all know that Gmail scans your email messages for key words to display related ad links right next to your correspondence if you use the browser to access your Gmail account. Now, it looks like the ad giant might be doing more than just scanning your email messages.
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Popularity: 50%
December 25th, 2007
Posted by
em8chel <<
geek pride, party like it's 1984 >>
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