China bans Youtube again

China blocked Youtube again this week after several videos were posted that showed Chinese police violently assaulting Tibetans. On Tuesday, a Chinese news organisation noted what it called a "fabricated" video in which police beat Tibetans during a riot in Lhasa last year. On the same day a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman repeated the mantra of Premier Wen Jiabao when he said "we encourage the active use of the internet but also manage the internet according to law." He also claimed that China was “not afraid of the internet" however, he was afraid of a straight answer and refused to confirm if YouTube had been blocked.

According to the BBC, the graphic video was released by Tibetan exiles and shows hundreds of uniformed troops swarming through a Tibetan monastery. Some of the footage is available here and the full set of three movies can be found at tibetonline.tv. In one scene troops with batons assault a man while in another scene several more men (one of whom is a monk,) are lying on the ground while being beaten, kicked and choked. Some of the men have their hands tied while others are possibly unconscious. Tibetonline.tv says that one of the beaten men later died.

Youtube’s California head office confirmed their service had been blocked after posting the footage but had gotten no explanation from the Chinese authorities. Scott Rubin told AFP the service had been blocked since Monday for unknown reasons and they were working with authorities to restore access. Presumably that means an agreement to pull down the offending videos. In the meantime, Chinese users trying to access YouTube get the following message: "Network Timeout. The server at youtube.com is taking too long to respond."

This is latest in several incidents where China has banned Youtube. The most recent case occured in March last year when Youtube showed graphic images from Tibet, including videos of burning vehicles and monks being dragged through the streets by Chinese soldiers. The videos forced Youtube’s owner Google to choose between losing business opportunities or fighting censorship. And Google’s response is somewhat ambiguous. Robert Boorstin, Google’s director of policy communications says it is a situation that all Internet companies will be facing across the world. "At all times, our goal is to maximize the amount of information available to citizens around the world,” he says. However Google’s own Chinese search service censor its search results to comply with Beijing's strict limits on access to information.

According to Kaiser Kuo, the Chinese government’s censorship policies, often render news and political reporting formulaic,staid, and not reliably objective. He says China’s Internet is more “entertainment superhighway” than “information superhighway” as the local 250 million Internet users typically devote most of their time to downloads, chatting with friends, playing online games, and watching online videos. However, the Internet is developing into the country’s first public sphere; a virtual space, says Kuo where a huge range of ideas are openly expressed.

But censors continue to listen in on the public conversation and Tibetan violence was not the only thing China blocked this week. A video of a seemingly innocuous mythical alpaca-like animal known as the “Grass Mud Horse” complete with its own jaunty children’s song has attracted the ire of authorities because of its double meanings. In Chinese the phrase grass mud horse (Cao Ni Ma) sounds remarkably close to “fuck your mother” and the song is replete with other phrases that sound like either swear words or reference to censorship. As a result the authorities have banned both the video and the song. Judge its seditious intentions for yourself below:

You eye

Question: what do Lindbergh, Ghandi, Hitler, Stalin, Queen Elizabeth II, Nixon, Ayatollah Khomeini, George W Bush and you all have in common?

Answer: They, and you, have all been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Time has been giving the title for the last 50 years to the person who they believe had the greatest impact on the year's events. It aims to pick "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill". You, though you may not have realised, are the current incumbent having been awarded the title in 2006. Time magazine deemed your impact greater than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chinese leader Hu Jintao and North Korea's Kim Jong-il who were all deemed 2006 runners-up.

You, in Time’s context, are the second person plural that includes everyone on the Internet. More precisely the title recognises the impact of Web 2.0 and the growing online democracy. In Time’s own words, 2006 has been “a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.” In particular they cited bloggers, podcasters, social networkers and video makers who they described as “millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy”. It also extolled the contribution of such tools as Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace.

The title dates back to a slow news week at end of 1927. The editors came up with a concept of “Man of the Year” and the initial award was given to Charles Lindbergh in honour of the first solo trans-Atlantic flight earlier that year. Lindbergh was the first real 20th century hero America so desperately needed in the twenties. It was also the chance to remedy the embarrassment of Time’s failure to put him on the magazine cover at the time of the historic flight.

Although the name remained Man of the Year until 1998, several women have received Time’s gong. The Queen was anointed in 1952, the year she acceded to the throne. Before her, a more controversial British royal Wallis Simpson was the first woman to take the award in the abdication year of 1936. Other "non-men" to take the title were the Hungarian Freedom Fighters for the uprising of 1956, US scientists in 1960, “twenty five and under” (what we now call Baby Boomers) in 1966, the “middle Americans” in 1959, “American Women” in 1975 and “the American Soldier” in 2003 (the year of the Iraqi invasion). In 1982 the Man of the Year wasn’t even a person at all, it was “the Computer”.

The title has attracted much controversy over the years. The fact that the impact can be “for better or worse” has seen Hitler, Stalin and the Ayatollah take out the “honour”. Khomeini was named Man of the Year in 1979, the year of the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the start of the American embassy hostage crisis. Time received immense criticism in the US for naming Khomeini as Man of the Year. As a result of the backlash, Time has shied away from naming unpopular figures ever since. Although the criteria for the choice is “the individual or group of individuals who have had the biggest effect on the year's news", the magazine editors ignored this in 2001. In the wake of 9/11, they named Rudolph Giuliani as Man of the Year over the more obvious choice of Osama Bin Laden.

2006’s choice has critics divided again. “You” is not universal. According to Internet World Stats internet penetration is far from ubiquitous. Whereas 70% of North Americans are connected, barely 3% have Internet access in Africa. And although there are over one billion people online world-wide, 87% of the world’s population still does not have access.

Optimists hail the social transformation of web 2.0 and the active engagement medium of the Internet. These people hail user-driven content and see it as a portent for the arrival of the “participatory Panopticon”. The panopticon was Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century ideal jail where all prisoners could be constantly observed. But in the world of the participatory panopticon, this constant surveillance is done by the citizens themselves out of choice. The main tool will be high resolution camera phones creating internet moblogs in a form of “sousveillance” (or watching from below).

However others remind us that the panopticon metaphor is a prison model and that those in power will seek to maintain their great advantages in the 21st century. The harshest critics of “You” were the mainstream media who see participatory journalism as amateur interference on their profitable patch.

YouTube top 10 for 2006

2006 saw the astonishing rise of the video sharing website YouTube. Founded less than two years ago by three PayPal employees, it was sold in October to Google for a cool $1.65 billion in Google stock. According to a survey in July, 20 million viewers a month visit YouTube and they watch 100 million clips every day. This week, journalist Jake Coyle of Associated Press released his list of the top ten videos of 2006 declaring this to be the year that YouTube became “culturally ubiquitous”.

Number 1 in the list is Lonelygirl15. The series of videos purported to tell the story of high school girl Bree and her lonely life as the daughter of well-travelled parents. She has a boyfriend and a webcam and she spills the beans about her emotional life in her videos. Bree proved a quirky hit and she quickly became YouTube most viewed site. Then in September, Lonelygirl15 was exposed as a hoax. The videos were scripted and Bree turned out to be 19 year old New Zealand actress Jessica Rose. The creators exploited the anonymity of the Internet to pull off a new kind of storytelling. The site remains popular despite being exposed as fiction.

At number 2, is Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday" which did much to start the momentum for YouTube early in 2006. Lazy Sunday was a music video starring Saturday Night Live (SNL) cast members Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg. It mixed the hipness of rap and comedy with a knack for well-rhymed cultural references. It aired on SNL in December 2005. After being posted to YouTube, it was viewed more than five million times. Finally its popularity alerted copyright owners NBC Universal who asked the site to remove it in February. The video is still available on NBC’s site.

Republican senator George Allen from Virginia was deeply embarrassed after his racial slur of an opponent’s native American volunteer was captured on video. Coming in at number 3, Allen repeatedly called a volunteer for Democrat James Webb a "macaca” at a campaign rally saying “This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent.” A macaca can be a monkey, a town in South Africa or a racial slur against African immigrants in some parts of Europe. As a large result of the publicity of the video, Allen lost his re-election bid.

AP awarded the number 4 vote to the YouTube founders themselves. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen posted a video after they sold their stake to Google. They thanked their users and promised to remain committed to the project. They also were now filthy rich.

At 5 was the video Here it Goes Again by the American band Ok Go featuring the band doing a very elaborate choreographed dance on treadmills. The video was viewed by over 1 million people in the first 6 days. By virtue of this exposure, the band scored a massive radio hit and an MTV video music awards performance. The video is now the 8th most viewed item on YouTube with almost 9 million views.

Michael Richards won 6th spot for his head-turning racist rant at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles last month. Richards said he lost his cool during a stand-up slot while being heckled. Richards repeatedly called the heckler a nigger. The former Seinfeld star went on the Letterman show and deeply apologised for his rage. But the damage was done and the YouTube video of the tirade did much to leave Richards “washed up” as predicted in the video itself.

Number 7 was a victory for the grey brigade. Although it is seen as a youth marketing tool, the user geriatric1927 has become one of the biggest and unlikeliest stars of the YouTube community. Geriatric1927 is Peter from Britain dubbed “virtual grandad” by the media. Born in 1927 and now a widower, Peter has been telling his life story on camera. He now enjoys the status of YouTube’s elder statesmen to a growing audience of younger viewers.

Coming in at number 8, is the video of police officers striking a suspect in California which had big repercussions. Two police officers repeatedly struck William Cardenas while arresting him. The footage was captured by a neighbour on a phone camera. When the footage was shown in court it was ruled as "more than reasonable” behaviour. But when the video was posted on YouTube, over 155,000 viewers were horrified by this version of reasonableness. The FBI is now investigating the case as potential police brutality.

Number 9 highlights the international appeal of YouTube. Two art students in China became internationally known without saying a word. Known as the "Two Chinese Boys" or the “Back Dormitory boys”, Huang Yixin and Wei Wei became renowned for their passionate and over-the-top lip-synching of Backstreet Boys songs. The career of the two basketball-shirted Chinese Boys is now on the move and they have been hired by a Beijing media agency for a Pepsi television commercial.

Finally at ten is another Asian entry. “Funtwo” is a young guitarist in his bedroom playing a rock arrangement of Johann Pachelbel's Canon using a difficult technique called sweep picking. Canon is a turn of the 18th century piece known for its solemn chord progressions. It was an instant success with almost 8 million views. Funtwo’s baseball cap obscures his face during the video. Funtwo was eventually revealed to be 23-year-old Korean Jeong-Hyun Lim.

They were the best of 2006. The big question for YouTube in 2007 is how it will handle the copyright challenges. 65,000 videos are downloaded to YouTube every day, many of which are in breach of copyright. The issue of a merger between Google Video and YouTube also needs to be addressed. For now however, YouTube’s large user base continues to enjoy the democratisation of video.

YouTube outage

Web video sensation YouTube.com, which serves up more than 100 million videos online a day, suffered a six-hour breakdown on Tuesday -- its first-ever unplanned outage, a company spokeswoman confirmed today. She also stated that the problem was related to a database issue. The problem occurred on the same day as a release from internet audience measurement firm comScore Networks on Tuesday which showed that YouTube surged into the top 40 ranking U.S. Web sites for July, with 16 million visitors, up 20 percent in one month.

YouTube was founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. It is is a social web site that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. The company employs 50 people in San Mateo (near San Franciso) California. YouTube uses Adobe Flash to serve its content, which includes clips from films and television programs, music videos, and homemade videos. Video feeds of YouTube videos can also be easily embedded on blogs and other websites. YouTube prohibits the posting of copyrighted video by anyone but the copyright holder; however, restriction of copyrighted material has proven difficult. The three founders of YouTube were all early employees of PayPal. The site's popularity surged in December 2005 when it hosted the Lazy Sunday clip from the NBC’s Saturday Night Live broadcast. Lazy Sunday became hugely popular among Internet communities for its memorable one-liners in a hip-hop parody based on the Chronicles of Narnia. In February this year, the NBC asked YouTube to remove Lazy Sunday and other copyrighted video clips. However, by June 2006, NBC had radically reconsidered its approach to YouTube; now the two companies have announced a strategic partnership. Under the terms of the partnership, NBC will create an official NBC Channel on YouTube to showcase its preview clips for The Office. YouTube will also promote NBC's videos throughout its site.

Copyright remains a major problem for YouTube. Their policy does not allow content to be uploaded by anyone other than the copyright holder. They remove videos that infringe on copyrights, but a large amount of copyrighted material is uploaded nonetheless. These are typically only discovered when they are reported by the YouTube community, or when the copyright holder reports them. Others have questioned whether they have a viable business model. The site was founded on $11.5 million in venture capital but didn't gain any revenue until March, when they cautiously began selling ads. The site's bandwidth costs, which increase every time a visitor clicks on a video, may be approaching $1 million a month--much of which goes to provider Limelight Networks.

The popularity of YouTube has inspired other websites into creating similar services. The craze over sharing homemade videos on the Internet is beginning to draw some big-time Hollywood players. On Monday, Warner Bros. announced that Internet video site Guba has started selling downloads of the studio's movies and TV shows. Guba is the first among the video-sharing sites to offer full-length movies. They also announced last month it had chosen file-sharing technology from BitTorrent to distribute films. BitTorrent is designed to distribute large amounts of data widely without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources. Internet optimists predict that online video, long-rumoured to be the next big thing, is finally taking off. Some estimates that video generated $230 million in revenue in 2005 but will jump to $1.7 billion by 2010. In the meantime YouTube needs to grow with its bandwidth and ensure that the bad publicity of the overnight outage is not repeated in a hurry.