There is nothing wrong with self promotion, and promoting your friends and family is just fine. Google knows when you are self promoting yourself and Google knows when you are promoting your friends. Google knows everything about you, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. This means Google can weight each Review differently and output the Reviews differently in a personalized way for each user.

Imagine what will filter up to the top for search queries such as “Who should be the president?”, “What should we do about Iraq?”, “Are Oil companies doing good?”, “What should my neighbour do with his garden?”

Google could in fact realise this idea that I’ve had for the last 4 years, Google could become the Truth Engine, making a system that uses the collective intelligence of all the people and outputs 100% the truth. This would force every politician to follow orders from the population, this would make direct democracy a reality.

Do you want to know the truth about anything in realtime? Simply look it up on Google. Do you know something, do you have some proof, do you have some evidence, do you have some ideas? Simply publish them on Google, based on your profile and usage behaviour, and other users appreciations of your submitions, your Truth can become the truth.

You can see a video of this feature at TechCrunch.com: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/

The worst thing I think with regards to content owners being still legitimally angry at Youtube, is that Youtube still doesn’t monetize the views as it should, so all these billions of views of copyrighted material isn’t directly monetized, basically it’s bad for content owners and bad for Youtube as well in terms of paying for bandwidth and infrastructure. Although some say content owners can monetize their content indirectly (stuff like when people watch your music video or your concert video on Youtube, more people buy your CD) and some people say it doesn’t matter that Google is loosing millions of dollars on paying for the bandwidth and infrastructure required to deliver 40 thousand terrabytes of bandwidth per month currently, including the infrastructure required to encoding of 1000 minutes of video every minute, host it and process it in different ways.

I didn’t like Flash based videos when Youtube started, I still don’t like it. But the popularity and ease of use of the Youtube experience is impressive. Still though, I think it’s much too hard to really get meaningful experiences on Youtube, the personalized video recommendations engine isn’t very good so far, the quality is still so low and the incentive from content producers is still very limited cause the monetization is not very effective.

Google is the coolest company out there, but I think they are still too slow at releasing new features. It’s been over a year and a half since Google aquired Youtube, and still nothing much seem to have happened other then perhaps that there is a better more reliable infrastructure behind it, view count and audience is growing, fancy statistics for the content providers, that’s still no difference from the users point of view and especially I would say it could be said to be disappointing from the content providers point of view.

Chad Hurley says he is proud that there are some college kids that are earning thousands of dollars each month posting videos to Youtube, that some people get record contracts or get hired on TV because of being discovered on Youtube. That’s all fine and well, I wouldn’t have the exact monetization statistics, but I don’t think there are more then a few tens perhaps a few hundreds of independent content providers that are able to make money on Youtube thus far. Monetization of Youtube with banner ads next to the video is not much better then traditional adsense, you need millions of hits to start making a few hundreds dollars a month. Once Youtube has activated automatic overlay advertising, the monetization rates should grow 10x or 100x in terms of monetization per 1000 views. This will lead to tens of thousands of college kids being able to make a living being creative with their video publishing on Youtube. So really, Youtube needs to increase the impact from monetization 1000 times.

I posted this as a comment at newteevee.com

We need an online parliament where every person is a representative of the people, where good ideas and the truth automatically are highlighted using direct democracy and algorithms. Any leader should then promise to serve the will of the people by using this democratic system on the Internet.

Representative democracy was invented before the airplane, before the telephone and before the Internet. We need to upgrade democracy.

I posted this suggestion as a comment to the Hillary Clinton and Obama video on Youtube in Unity, NH.

I think that the new rules should be following:

- The Democracy involved at ICANN should rule on sharked, spammed or unused domains. As well as trademarks automatically are monitored using a database so suspicious attempts at registering trademarks will be identified.

- ICANN should control the whole system themselves using a central Google Apps like infrastructure that can scale to cover all TLD and all domains for the whole world.

- Domains should be free, no price, nada. Other then perhaps a very small fee to cover the costs of maintaining the whole DNS, database and ICANN controlling system. Thus price for a domain should be probably less than 1 dollar per domain per year. ICANN should remove all the domain registrar business, we don’t need it. The price of a domain should be public knowledge and nobody should pay more than that price.

- To register a domain you need to give your real identity to ICANN, you have to register your business and be able to submit tax papers and government controlled verification in case of a conflict.

This will be just like newsgroups, the value of .com and all current TLDs will decrease, and now the value instead is going to be the content and the relevancy. Today is a great day for democracy online, for relevancy of searches, for the quality of the content online, for the semantic web and for the freedom of speech.

I think this could be so insanely huge it will revolutionize the whole entertainment industry. Finally it will be possible to make a living putting videos on the Internet. As much as $10 or $15 per 1000 views on the videos should be what Google would be paying any content creator who ties up their Youtube account with their Adsense account and who activates the Overlay advertising on all their videos. No Youtube content creator would be forced to activate the ads, but if the content creator wants to earn money they would be able to flip a switch and start displaying ads on all of their uploaded videos.

So I was saying, this will revolutionize the entertainment and blogging industry cause it would be relatively easy for video-bloggers to then improve the quality of their video productions to get higher audiences. When artists and citizen journalists finally get paid even just a little for their effort, they will be able to do this full time. Walk around with Youtube connected cell phones and still concentrate uploading a lot more quality content then they were uploading back when uploading videos on Youtube was something the independent content producers only did in their free time as a hobby.

I think Google are probably fine-tuning the overlay advertising feature to have it totally ready for when they launch it big time for any content provider on Youtube to be able to start making serious money. Income per 1000 views on Youtube overlay ads are perhaps as much as 100 times higher compared to textual ads using Adsense on for example blogs.

Hey, what’s wrong with Microsoft continuing to invest multi-billions of dollars to push and promote their Windows XP alternative to Sugar Linux, why is that bad? At the end Microsoft will be forced to provide an open source version of Windows XP or perhaps Microsoft will even be forced to develop software based on Linux and the goal of OLPC will be completely reached.

I know OLPC is not a laptop project but it is. I’d like to see the XO in a commercial version sold in my local supermarket within the next few months for $200 each. OLPC needs to commercialize the product in partnership with whomever brands and distributors who would like to take care of the commercial mass market distribution. This way, the whole industry will have to speed up even faster and reach the result of the $100 laptop that works for 24h on a battery in sunlight and connects to broadband wireless internet for free everywhere.

I think that free public transportation is an inevitability in all cities. It’s the most effective way to reduce significantly the CO2 emissions in a city. It also creates better equality for the poor and the middle class who can better afford transportation. It reduces car traffic and improves parking conditions.

I think that there are no arguments against providing free public transportation in all cities of the world. A way to improve the organization of the public transportation would be to use a software on people’s mobile phone using GPS, uploading people’s position to the city overview system, which can then regulate frequency of the different busses, trains, subways dynamically with the exact real-time expectation of demand at any given place in the city. Also combining that as soon as possible with the Personal Rapid Transit system:

I would like Last.fm to add these features:

- Personalized recommendations filtered by genre, mixed with Loved tracks by genre. Basically this would provide an automatic DJ’ing function. So for example I could set Last.fm up to play lots of party tracks at a party. And perhaps have it synchronize with a Pioneer type of hardware but very cheap type that let’s me preview the next songs, re-arrange them and mix them live.

- “Download all songs by this artist” feature. Artists are able to add songs that Last.fm users can download for free. I’d like to download all songs in one click, even if it would cost me a few cents per gygabyte and that it downloads through a Last.fm download manager integrated with the player software. And also download x amount of GB of songs from my recommendations and from my Loved tracks. Basically this feature would be to fill up my Mp3 player with music that I like, that I need to discover, that fits my taste, complete discographies for artists which I loved one of their songs, basically fill up my Mp3 player without me having to think too much what to put on it.

- Let me pay the artists through Last.fm. I’d like to pay for example $5 per month which I would like to reward all the artists that I listen to a lot. Especially the artists who’s song I love on Last.fm, especially the artists who provide me with free Mp3 downloads. So based on popularity and quality, this Voluntary Artists Money should be redistributed by Last.fm. The idea is that millions of Last.fm users could fund a lot of artists, giving them an incentive to release all their music on Last.fm as free Mp3 downloads so they can earn a larger amount of money this way. Integrate this with countries legislation on the global licence, so people through taxes can reward the most popular and the highest quality artists. So Last.fm this way could provide the statistics to reward all the artists fairly.

http://labs.divx.com/node/1320

I think that the DivX Connected set-top-box standard is the beginning of the mass media revolution. Soon the box will cost below $100, currently it is available for £130 at Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-DSM-330-Connected-Wireless-Player/dp/B000X4F7RO.

Currently the DivX Connected hardware requires a Windows based computer on your local network to function, it uses a Windows software to stream content from the Internet to your TV using HDMI on a HDTV or using composite, scart and component connections. But there is probably a next version of DivX Connected hardware in the planning that would also provide the option to work without the need to have a desktop or laptop computer in the home, which I think is crucial to reach mass market penetration, to reach and change media consumption for consumers who aren’t using broadband Internet much to watch videos yet.

You can watch my Interview with the DivX Connected products manager Dan Salmonsen demonstrating the technology at IFA 2007: http://techvideoblog.com/ifa/divx-connected/