An anthropological introduction to YouTube

My friend Henrik at Alfa Bravo brought me this piece of youtube video by Michael Wesch, which is one of those "wow... WOW... WOOOOOOOOW... this is really huge, everyone has to see it" things. So please see it, even though it's long. It's so cool.

One of the greatest parts of the video is at 45:25, by Lawrence Lessig (the quote is from this speech):

"We need to recognize you can't kill the instinct that technology produces, only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again, we can only make them, quote "pirates" and is that good? We life in this weird time, this kind of age of prohibition where in many areas of our lives, we live life constantly against the law, ordinary people live life against the law. And that's what we're doing against our kids, they live life knowing they live it against the law."

iPhone 3G is released by EMT in Estonia

Estonian EMT has released the iPhone 3G too now. If I understand the newsletter correctly the contracts are all 24 months, so it's not comparable to the 18 months column above. I was saying that I think traffic should be cheaper in Estonia, but instead it seems they simply do not provide any "maxi" plan, and charge a bit more than Telia does in Sweden. My phone bills are currently too high, but I am not very excited about this deal.

price plan	traffic included	monthly fee	iPhone 3G 8 GB, tied 24 months	iPhone 3G 16 GB, tied 24 months
i550	100 minutes, 100 SMS, 100 MB	550 EEK (= 329 SEK)	2670+24·550 = 15870 EEK (= 9486 SEK)	3960+24·550 = 17160 EEK (= 10257 SEK)
i890	250 minutes, 250 SMS, 250 MB	890 EEK (= 532 SEK)	1490+24·890 = 22850 EEK (= 13658 SEK)	2780+24·890 = 24140 (= 14429 SEK)

Swedes have a few vowels to spare (any serbian buyers?)

For comic effect regarding the Swedish language, I told the following story:

A Finn and a Swede were arguing which ones mother tongue sounds more beautiful. Since they couldn't find any solution they asked help from an english linguistic, who asked both of them to translate the following poem by Percy Shelley into their own languages:

"Island, island, Grassy island, Grassy island's Bride."

It was the Finn's turn first. He translated:

"Saari, saari, Heinäsaari, Heinäsaaren Morsian."

Then the Swede translated:

"Ö, ö, Hö-ö, Hö-öns Mö."

I recorded myself reading that, check it out here.


Admittedly, I did that to have an excuse to experiment a bit more with Audacity, a great open source multi-platform sounds editing tool. It is fairly easy to use even though you of course have to get to understand some basic sound editing concepts (there are great tutorials for the program), then it's just rock'n'roll. Record or import, give it a few seconds of just background noise to analyze, remove the noise, crop the clip, amplify to normal levels and export to mp3. Very simple.

PS. Speaking of open source and free software, TestDisk saved my ass the other day, when Boot Camp Assistant deleted the opposite partition it said it would. TestDisk rapidly analyzed my disk and recovered the original filesystem like a charm!

Elb^H^Hstonia has computer security competence too!

... though can they see through a demoralizing business plan?

Bloggers are yappy chihuahuas? (On obeying copyright claims)

Yesterday Fredrik Svedjetun of Dagens Media wrote an editorial where he decided to compare the community of at least Swedish bloggers to yappy chihuahuas. The generalization and silliness aside - this is a part of a long running discussion (both pages in Swedish, sorry about that) about how DM request payment for when their copyright protected material has been used by bloggers, which in turn has made the bloggers furious for more or les wellfounded reasons (therefore the yapping).

Before giving my view on this debate, I'd like to display a picture of myself depicted as a roundabout dog:


Now to the issue at hand - obviously there is a bit of friction between what is with some despise called "old media" and the new media represented by bloggers (though which to be fair should include also microbloggers, youtubers, podcasters, shoutcasters, livestreamers etc.), on the way things are done, accountability and licensing. My simplistic judgement is that the new media of course will play according to different rules, you cannot register a legal entity for every space in which you would like to share your thoughts, comment or communicate, and you can't keep track of if your material may be dissipated in either of these spaces. Though if someone manages to catch and complain to you (as was the case with Blondinbella and deeped), I suggest you follow the law and fold as much as you have to. Simple as that - they have the law on their side so quit whining!

On the other hand, we of the new media are also in our every right to make a lot of noise about copyright holders choices to greedily charge us if we'd without buying a license use their material, and it's not making Dagens Media look very good. Don't whine - notice, complain and show disliking by buying your services from someone you like better the next time.

To the point of diminishing the Swedish "blogosphere", indeed they are largely Stockholm-residing latte-sipping MF's, but they have also proven a couple of times that they are being heard and that they can accomplish some very real changes on society, which is enough reason to want to consider myself part of them. It's a bit curious though - the Swedish blogosphere is so much more tightly knit through sites like knuffa (Swedish digg.com) that even with a smaller potential audience, I would probably reach a much larger actual audience if I would write in Swedish than I do currently, writing in English. The global internet is simply to big and I'm excluded from the Swedish blogosphere since I want to be read also by my Estonian friends and others. I will have to suffer that for now I guess.

(Update: Simon has generalized the whole thing into a simple yet efficient scheme for achieving more visitors to your web sites. Yes, sometimes a small fine or bill is cheap to pay compared to the publicity you get - now if I only would be able to make money off the doubtfully legal things I do...)