YouTorrent: Give It A Shot Before It’s Shut Down

YouTorrent is a fairly new BitTorrent search engine that has been getting positive reviews of late.

The premise is simple: YouTorrent is a meta-search engine that indexes torrents from other sites (such as btjunkie, The Pirate Bay), then prioritizes the results based on the number of seeds and peers each torrent has. For example a search for something like Cloverfield offers multiple results but most importantly provides the torrent with the most participants first. For those not familiar with BitTorrent, the more seeds and peers a Torrent has, the faster the file will likely download.

As a meta-search engine YouTorrent doesn’t discriminate against legal and pirated content (yes, there is legal content on BitTorrent) so it’s a case of anything goes, and this is both a strength and a weakness. If you do frequently download using BitTorrent you’ll love YouTorrent, it’s quick and the results it gives negates the need to use other sites when searching for Torrents. On the other hand YouTorrent efficiently facilitates video piracy; sure, there’s an ongoing legal argument as to whether a search engine can be held liable for indexing pirated content elsewhere, but that didn’t help TorrentSpy when the Feds came knocking. The site is hosted in the Netherlands and has a Moniker hide your details service running on the Whois record, but chances are if the owners are in the United States, it’s probably only a matter of time until the MPAA or RIAA sends in the lawyers, so give it a shot while you still can.

Songza Adds More Songs With Help From Seeqpod

Today Songza just got bigger by embracing one of its rivals. The music-search engine (and Crunchies nominee) is incorporating song search results from Seeqpod, expanding the number of songs it can stream from 15.5 million to 23.5 million. Now you can get results from both music search engines in one place. Songza is also considering incorporating songs from Skreemr and other music search engines in the future.

Previously Songza pulled songs solely from Youtube (by only playing the audio track of music videos). Seeqpod is an MP3s search engine that finds songs and streams them from across the Web, including ones that may infringe copyright. (Read this post by Michael to understand why this actually might be legal).

Songza is also launching a Self Promotion beta for artists who want to promote their bands on the site. For 99 cents, bands can get a song on the recommended list of Songza’s home page for 24 hours. The site gets about 40,000 visitors a day. That translates to 1.2 million visitors a month. Not too shabby for a site that launched in November. The company is working with Creative Commons to get the word out about the beta, and is populating the recommended list with Creative Commons artists. Once it builds an actual recommendation engine, which it is working on, it will pull in other songs as well.

Last month, Songza was spun off from Humanized, whose co-founders were recently hired by the Mozilla foundation. Songza will continue to be run as a separate business. It is currently seeking funding.

Google Offers OpenID Logins Via Blogger

After testing OpenID’s as logins to Google’s Blogger in Draft program in November, Google has become an OpenID provider itself. The news confirms TechCrunch UK’s story of January 9, which also predicted that IBM and VeriSign would soon be joining the OpenID train.

Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option via the draft.blogger.com admin menu. Google’s baby steps follow the announcement last week that over 250 million Yahoo users would be able to use their Yahoo logins as OpenID. Reports have put users of Blogger at somewhere between 10 million and 50 million, although the service is renowned as a haven for spam so how many legitimate bloggers will take up this service is unclear. It also isn’t being provided as yet via the regular Blogger quite yet, only via the Blogger in Draft service (although this is available to those who wish to use it), however this is the regular first step for new features in Blogger so it could be expected to become a standard option sometime later this year.

Blogger Adds Middle Eastern Language Support

Following the downtime experienced by those on the Blogger platform, some will welcome a few new features for the system announced in the wee hours of the night. The blogging platform is now capable of employing Arabic, Hebrew and Persian.

Aside from the sociological ramifications (we’ll get to those in a second), the Blogger team considers this a not insignificant feat of programming, too. This is since those three languages (as opposed to the other 37 languages Blogger supports) are written from right to left.  To accomplish this, they’ve flipped the entire interface around, and created a suite of right-to-left templates.

Instructions for resetting your blog and installing the new templates to one of the new languages can be found at the announcement post at Blogger Buzz.

More to the point of the social ramifications of the move to new languages, most of us that inhabit the social media space primarily can see the benefits to these tools being readily available, and of all the places on the planet, the region of the Middle East is the most likely candidate for positive results from decreased barriers to open communication.  In other war-torn areas, we’ve seen what an influx of technology can do for those seeking to raise awareness and find solutions in the face of what is usually state-sponsored oppression.

In the Middle East, especially known for blocking sites that violate moral regulations, having a tool like Blogger that is simple to implement and provides a large platform to the world (think Salam Pax) can on the whole only lead to good things.

Google Said To Be Prepping Launch Of Social Science Data Network

Google has in the last few months been very much focused on consumers (and the business which cater to consumers). The company has leveled a good deal of attention at YouTube and AdSense and so forth, all in its ongoing pursuit to better serve its users - and make more cash to boot.

But on occasion, Mountain View does some high-minded good. Just a couple of days ago, Larry, Sergey and gang pledged a pile of pennies to, in the words of our own Kristen Nicole, “make the world a better place.”

And now the tech giant is (selflessly) thinking again about the world of science and how it can better put its data storage prowess to use to benefit the frizz-haired genii walking the planet. Google is putting the finishing touches on a storage system to be reserved exclusively for the modern Einsteins among us to aggregate and share mathematical quandaries and solutions with their fellow whitecoats. Of course, it’ll be free of any cost to all of its users.

Google’s Research domain, where the new service is slated to have its launch, isn’t entirely new. It has indeed been active for quite a long while. But Google has more or less kept that area a rather silent space in which a small coterie of number crunchers and educators has participated. The company wants to change that. Since its revelation of a planned Web-based science center, originally dubbed “Palimpsest,” at the Science Foo camp in August ’07, Google has worked on building the framework for an open-source scientific nexus meant to attract minds the world over.

It planned to officially introduce the system during the week of Jan 14, but has evidently delayed its release. Alexis Madrigal of Wired Science said yesterday that it would have its debut “soon.”

What should a scientist expect in “Palimpsest” when it arrives? A hybrid of the data visualization technology Trendalyzer and a social, YouTube-like annotation and commentary solution. What does that mean, exactly? Heck if I know. Venture over to this Pimm blog post to cycle through a brief slide show to get some measure of what one will likely encounter on launch day.

European Politicians Express Support For File Sharing

In a highly unusual move for any political group today, the Greens EFA party of the European Parliament have publicly expressed their support for file sharing on the Net.

The party has taken the highly progressive step of speaking out on the part of consumers who have been treated as criminals by various media industries. To aid in educating people about the situation, they’ve launched the site IWouldntSteal.net that highlights the party’s concerns and offers visitors the option to download a film associated with the campaign.

The video and website carry the same basic idea: that the music and movie industries have made downloading a file the equivalent of stealing a handbag or television set.

The Greens of course don’t feel that is a just assessment. The party sees that laws which have been passed to supposedly “support the artists” do nothing more than turn everyday citizens into criminals, and protects the profits of the media conglomerates. IWouldntSteal.net mentions the party’s discontent over the inclusion of “propaganda” on every DVD consumers encounter.

While it is surely noble for the Greens EFA to take up the cause of consumer rights, the target audience for their campaign seems a slightly odd choice. Won’t they essentially be “preaching to the choir,” as it were, failing to enlighten the broader public?

Those who know how to use a torrent client obviously believe in the concept of sharing already, and certainly they will enjoy having some politicians on their side, but how they plan to get the message out to the wider citizenry is unclear. Educating the masses is what is needed, and for now this seems more a play by the party to win support than an attempt to enact real change.

PBS To Expand Video Collection On YouTube

Wanna watch lots of previews and excerpts of liberal, communist propaganda by way of YouTube? Look here.

PBS, or the Public Brainwashing Broadcasting Service, announced plans recently to expand the supply of its trademark leftist content on the uber-popular video host. InformationWeek reported that it would grow the current list of some 700 clips to one which will include…more clips.

An estimate as to the number of videos expected for the latest infusion was not given, though by the look of the PBS channel’s current subscribership (3,229 as of 6:28PM EST), a great many more would not be too alluring to new viewers. The page’s maintenance crew might wish to buck convention and exercise some conservatism when hitting them upload buttons.

In all honesty, I enjoy a good amount of PBS programming now and then. The offerings born of the Masterpiece Theatre brand are very well crafted. Only commercial network titles like NBC’s Heroes and Journeyman and ABC’s Lost and Brothers & Sisters can really run with the best of the public broadcasts.

But there is a fatal flaw in PBS’s YouTube presentation: the ever-present and ever-annoying time limit. Because video clips cannot run north of 10 minutes in length, the PBS experience (a measured, non-sound-byte-driven atmosphere) is effectively dismembered. And that’s a terrible thing. How could anyone be satisfied with an incomplete Charlie Rose conversation? One-half hour, at least! (Oppositely, some find Rose an unappealing chatterbox, and might then consider the PBS channel a waste of fine server space altogether.)

Perhaps YouTube’s administrators should begin to weigh the option of removing barriers at the request of premium content providers. It’s time that users be given the chance to once again view media as it was meant to be.

Slide takes $50 mln in funding amid Facebook craze

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Social network software maker Slide Inc said on Friday it had closed a $50 million institutional financing round, marking the rising valuations of start-ups riding fast-growing Facebook's wave of popularity.