A Copyright Infringement Alternative For YouTube

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cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by imjustcreative

If someone uploads a video to YouTube that contains copyrighted information, and the copyright holder notifies YouTube, the video is taken down. If the copyright holder doesn’t take any issue, the video stays up.

I think there should be a third option where the video can stay up, but the ad revenue from the video is thereafter transferred to the copyright holder.

This keeps the link active, the content available, and view counts and comments intact, but removes some of the incentive to post copyrighted material to YouTube or Vimeo. 

Of course, you’d still have the option to remove the content entirely—forcing people to find it elsewhere—but why not have an alternative?

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No More Speed Bumps


cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by purplepick

I really do not like speed bumps. Not only are they annoying, but they seem ineffective. People just speed up between the bumps. I’ve always thought there was a better way.

Here’s the idea. Are you familiar with the grooves on the side of a highway that, when you drive over them, create a sound and cause your entire car to vibrate? Well, using this as a conceptual starting point, create a road surface that is only smooth to drive over at low speeds, and that, when driven over at higher than a certain speed behaves like the warning groove strips on the side of the road. In other words, the pavement or road becomes annoying to drive on when you are exceeding the speed limit.

It is easier to do the opposite way—where at high speeds the road seems smooth, but becomes difficult to drive over smoothly when the speed of the vehicle drops below a certain point. Even so, the right pattern of recessed depressions and grooves, and possibly applied treatments, make it possible to create a surface that is only comfortably driveable at lower speeds.

If so, not only would you have a better looking road, but it would also be more functional. And residents in apartment complexes the world over would be happier.

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Two Essential Features For Question & Answer Services


cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by ViaMoi

I’ve spent some time on Quora, Yahoo Answers, and similar sites, but the one thing that continues to frustrate me while I use them is that there are so many similar questions with similar answers, and there are so many answers delivered as attempts at humor or cleverness which do not really address the intent of the person asking the question, and therefore are clutter on the page.

These sites, however, seem sold on the idea of retaining everything within a question in some form. If you are trying to provide a service where people can get great answers to good questions, you need to be able to remove material that is not providing that value. I’m not talking about deleting controversial answers; those should remain available. But let the material of no substance go away. If you just gray it out and tell me it was downvoted, I don’t know whether it was controversial or just junk, so I still have to invest in clicking it and reading it. This is undesirable.

Secondly, and most importantly, there must be a way for two similar questions asked to be merged. Consider the following questions:

  1. How do I learn to play the guitar?
  2. What specific things should beginners focus on when learning guitar?
  3. What’s the first thing you should master when learning to play the guitar?

These are three actual individual questions on Quora right now. Quora and other QA sites become more difficult to navigate if these similar questions are not merged into one question. There is also the value added of increasing the likelihood of finding the one really great answer if you merge the questions.

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Archive Your Webmail Archives


cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by sludgegulper

Why isn’t it possible for me to select a folder of emails in my webmail client (or a group of emails sharing a tag) and export them to a .zip archive?

I think this would be especially useful for those who have temporary clients or projects. After the project is finished, the correspondence could be easily archived with other files on the person’s local drive (or uploaded to a cloud drive), and then removed from the webmail client. This would keep the webmail client uncluttered and easier to search and navigate, while providing the user with the information they might need to reference at some later point.

I realize you could just keep them in a webmail folder, but it gets cumbersome to manage a couple dozen folders or tags—-especially for files that might only need to be kept for a significant amount of time but only referenced every once in a very long while.

Of course, the .zip archive would contain the individual emails or conversation threads in a common format, e.g., .eml or .txt or .pdf. I think the webmail clients suffer from the belief that more information kept is always better and might hesitate to build this feature in, but a browser extension or add-on should work.

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Solar-Powered Vegas

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These are the images I took as I looked out from a room at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and I couldn’t help but wonder why these perfect surfaces weren’t covered in solar panels. There are so many parking garage and casino rooftop space like this in Las Vegas, and as far as I can see, none of it is being used to harvest the blistering hot sun that rains down on Vegas most every day.

I can only guess it has something to do with reflecting light into guest room windows, or the enormous amount of money the casinos take in daily that makes paying the electric bill pretty easy.

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When Google Fails


cc licensed flickr photo shared by westpark

“Just Google it.” (No one ever says, “Just Yahoo it,” much to Yahoo’s dismay.)

I’m not convinced that Google’s artificial intelligence has made it out of grade school yet. To prove this, all you need to do is imagine a destructive idea—making Google have the wrong answer.

You can already see this idea being carried out on a small scale, with people learning how Google ranks pages, and subsequently getting their pages ranked higher. These pages are only intended to serve impression ads, and often do not have the information the user was looking for when they first searched. While this phenomenon is still a growing one, it has so far been contained by the narrow interest of the perpetrator.

But, what if a group of people decided that they had no revenue interest in any one particular manipulated Google result, but instead wanted to make as many common inquiries to Google return results that are completely inaccurate and irrelevant—at least within the first 10-20 listings.

This concentrated effort would show that the algorithms that Google uses could not effectively address the problem before the troublemakers would be able to adapt and evolve themselves. A band of misfits numbering less than a thousand could probably stay ahead of Google’s efforts to stop their trouble making. This is largely because Google is doing everything in house.

To illustrate, imagine a factually correct Wikipedia result that someone one day decides to alter. The mistake will be corrected in a very short period of time, relatively speaking, because each visitor is like a tiny quality control department. A page of irrelevant Google results, on the other hand, will go much longer before being corrected, given what is required for Google’s personnel and algorithms to notice the problem.

I believe a vulnerability that undermines Google Search is an Achilles heel to the entire brand. There is a threshold of error that users will collectively allow, and if Google continues to move toward this instead of away from this, users will begin to search for an alternative (pun most definitely intended.)

I’m trying to describe a way for a new service to effectively compete without giving away too much of the delicious secret sauce.

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