Alex Reid

Blog Action Day, which is the brainchild idea of a vague web company, is a challenge to bloggers world-wide to talk about poverty on one day; October 15th, 2008.

I think this is a great idea as it will jump start Google News (and the kin) to snowball information relating to a serious social problem in one day. This will also likely create a wave of debate as the newsmakers pick up on the bloggers’ content for a week after wards.

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton for the Southern District of New York ruled on Thursday that Google, parent company of YouTube, must turn over 12 Terabytes of user data logs. It’s part of the discovery process that Viacom is doing in its $1 Billion lawsuit to prove that YouTube is hosting pirated videos from its collection.

Viacom is also getting all the videos YouTube ever removed for whatever reason. While this might help Viacom show that pirated videos were at one time hosted, it may show that YouTube was making efforts to combat it if there are any timestamps included with the inclusion and subsequent deletion of said pirated videos.

However, Viacom wanted more which it didn’t get. Viacom wanted YouTube’s proprietary search function source code as well as YouTube’s new “Video ID” program. In both cases, the argument from Viacom was that YouTube skewed their search results to show pirated videos and at the very least, perhaps Viacom can offer suggestions on how to help filter out said pirated videos. The judge denied Viacom on these two fronts, protecting Google’s Intellectual Property.

Finally, Viacom wanted a copy of every video ever put up in a private account. The judge, again, ruled against that citing the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

For the past year, Google has been cataloging 360 views of several major cities in North America by literally driving around in a car with a mounted 360 camera. Canadian company Immersive Media has already recorded several major Canadian cities such as Winnipeg.

While most of the camera vehicles (here and there) use more subtle camera equipment this one, that was pulled over this morning by US Park Police in California, does not.

Due to concerns raised by Canada’s federal privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart about the program breaching Canada’s privacy laws last September, Google has stated it will blur faces and license plates for Canadian views when it gets rolled out – which has already led to lower resolution imagery.

“We won’t launch Street View in Canada the same as in the U.S.,” Google’s global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer said. “It means concretely that we’ll try to not have identifiable faces and identifiable licence plate numbers in any Street View images in Canada.”

Google changed its Favicon from the big “G” to a small ‘g’ and I do not like it.