@graywolf, @sugarrae and @streko team
up to defeat the Evil Empire.

“its kinda like star wars … when the republic turned into the empire … (hint google isnt the jedi knights)”
– @graywolf

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Server Errors During YouTube Live launch

What if CNN Showed a 500 Error? Not all the time, just occassionally when you turn the channel to 43, or whatever channel it is in your cable system. Maybe it just did it when there was a big game on, the superbowl, the Obama Inaugeration. Maybe it was just a few users. It would still suck.

YouTube is trying to bring TV broadcasting to the masses with their new YouTube Live, and proved (at least to me) that they are not going to be the defacto winner

Maybe it was Akamai’s Fault. Who knows.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

Presidential Communication Will Be Google-Branded.

President-elect Barack Obama has announced that he will be using YouTube to send out his fireside chats every week. The hype-driven media once again lost the plot and failed to realize that he is endorsing a specific brand and promoting it every week to the American people by featuring YouTube as his main provider. Every week, millions of americans and billions of non-americans will see the YouTube logo next to our president.

Is YouTube the new presidential Seal? You can’t see the whole american flag on the screen, but the YouTube logo is in tact and on the screen 100% of the time during the first video.

What the average american, and perhaps reporter, doesn’t realize is that uploading a video to the internet is fairly simple. You don’t need Google, you don’t need YouTube, you simply need something to convert it into flash format and a rudimentary flash application to play it. You can even let people embed it — it’s embarrassingly simple for even the most mediocre of webmasters.

What’s next? Will he be flying on the “Virgin America One”, calling Putin on a “Verizon Hotline”, or maybe his motorcade will look like a NASCAR with a Valvoline and Penzoil paint job? Is the internet a series of Tubes again? I *thought* Obama would be the internet savvy president, but I was wrong.

In an embarrassingly small disclaimer, the Obama adminstration notes that they are making the video available on Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Nice. What about the hundreds of other video networks and video services? This is an outrage. Obama should have posted the video in it’s raw form and let whoever pick it up who wishes.

Keep the brands out of my government.

Don’t make me regret my vote.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

Will Google Launch a Flash and Silverlight Competitor?

In an extremely insightful post on it here, Gillmor guesses that Google has just made the first step towards creating a Flash and Silverlight competitor (Gillmor focuses only on Silverlight seemingly because so many in the valley love to hate Microsoft).

Back a few months ago, I thought it was an absolutely brilliant move when Microsoft struck a deal to only allow folks to watch the olympics if they installed silverlight.   Second, perhaps, to just making it part of the operating system, but we know where that gets you.  Now Google is requiring Gmail users to install their own common runtime (Gillmor presumes) in order to use thier new video calling feature they launched in direct competition to sites like Skype, TokBox, and free video chat service SnapYap.  They could have written this in Flash, but I’m sure their licensing fees to Adobe would be massive, and  Google probably took less in capex to develop their own code, they have the distribution channel, plus they can deploy a much richer experience.

As a developer, I’m excited to see what Google has coming. If you’ve ever looked at Adobe’s flex framework, it’s a mess. Coldfusion? Yuck. I’d take a google architected environment any day.

Will Google make the next step and require anyone who wants to view a YouTube video use Googliteflash?  They would certainly have overnight market penetration rivaling Adobe. Developer base?  Check.  Phone support?  Most likely.

This is going to step things up for Microsoft, and really hurt Adobe.

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Webroot-Says-Hackers-Exploit-Google-Trends-With-Malware/

This article from eWeek (again, I use mainstream loosely) explains how hackers use Google Trends to figure out what is a timely news article people might search for, then monopolize on the search terms by writing fake blogs.

Is there any reason to mention Google in this article, other than making it worth reading? You could replace “google trends” with “reading the newspaper” and it’s just as plausible. The mere mention of Google is the only reason this article is interesting. Get a clue eWeek.

Oh wait… they have one. They write an article about Google, put GOOG in it and it comes up during a google finance search… remind me to….

This post originated at the Online Marketer blog, home to marketing consultant John Coronella.