Stateline on YouTube

You got something to say to the ABC? Say it to the ABC.

Ethics in the media? Hey ethics where you can find them is great, the conversation about violence is more important I think, the ethics of the police using OC spray, the conversation is enough, when we are confronted by the nature of society, good and bad.

Interesting times.

🙂

A story on haw Viacom is making YouTube less useful by attacking all the cool videos.

My opinion is Viacom should affiliate with YouTube so that the videos can be purchased, instead of taking probably the most well targeted advertising you could get.

As to violence, well here the 4th estate is brushing up against the public, convergence in all its brillance.

The cammera is well an truely in the hands of the audience.

And the audience is able to describe what that is like on boards like this.

I love it!

I miss you guys…

It’s a sad fact Johnboy that as a society we seem to find a way to divert responsibility from the real cause. In this case it was a bunch of asshole kids stuffing around. But the stories have turned into ‘bad parenting’ and ‘violence on the web’. Why can’t it just be ‘asshole kids’?

VYBerlinaV8, I wouldn’t say I’m indignant as much as puzzled by the article.

Personally I would have thought the drunken violence after skyfire was the story and not whether watching it makes you bad.

*sigh* for the mouth breathing WMC (how are your norman vikings going buddy?) kids have been posting this video for some time, what happened two weeks ago was we started going out and looking for Canberra content on youtube and embedding what we thought was interesting.

I don’t know if you saw the Stateline article, I suspect that as usual your comments are ill-informed, but they were talking specifically about content that gained notoriety through us.

In one case ABC radio was giving out our URL to inform discussion of the piece (the Erindale pepper spraying).

Given the staggering number of ABC hits on this site in a day it’s not like they were unaware of the link and it was a huge gaping hole in their story.

In general the story was astonishingly ill informed. Even with high powered computers it takes hours to get video onto youtube, not the instantaneous process they described. Most people take several days to a week to get their stuff up there. The story had a lot of problems like that.

For example the Skyfire fight has still only has ~8,000 views and that’s after heavy national media exposure, so all the kids saying they’d watched it were hardly representative.

JohnBoy, your righteous indignation is one of the highlights of this web site!

Seriously mate, the site finally seems to be building up some steam – give it time, you will be a media magnate before you know it!

Why should they mention The RA? Nobody gives a toss about the middle man. If I saw the news articles, and wanted to watch the videos, I’d want to know where they were, not about some blog that happened to link to them.

Dude, YouTube publish all those stats FFS!

From the page:

Sites Linking to This Video:
353 clicks from http://www.zooweekly.com.au/members/viewPost.php?pid…
253 clicks from http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,…
187 clicks from http://the-riotact.com/
115 clicks from http://www.the-riotact.com/
86 clicks from http://the-riotact.com/?p=4465

So maybe it would help if you had any idea at all what you were talking about.

I’m going to address the ‘if they can show war on the news’ question separately because I need to think about it a bit more about replying.

But in the meantime, you say that the Daily Telegraph embedded the Civic fight video but that it got more views from you. Unless you have access to Youtube statistics that the rest of us don’t, how could you possibly know this?

I can see how you can say that the videos you embed get more views than those that you don’t (although there’s no way to know that it’s your embedding that got those higher view-counts, just that it got more views somehow), but how do you know that you got more video viewings than the DT?

On the first point videos we embed get a lot, a lot, more views than video’s we don’t embed.

Kids were watching this stuff before but since we started embedding it people are talking about it in a much bigger way.

As for editorial policy, the racy stuff has all been picked up by other media, the Daily Telegraph even embedded the Civic fight video (but it got more views from us).

We’re not showing porn, or snuff, so I don’t think we can be accused of using “whatever means are available”.

Because we’re a little nimbler than the other media in town we’re able to utilise the technology.

If they can show war on the news I’m surprised if anyone objects to a fight.

Jonboy you do great work of posting interesting Canberra (and dare I should say Queanbeyan?) youtube vids here. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Well I am off to dancing. Seeyas!

The popularity of these videos isn’t because of RiotACT, you know — although I must admit I was watching the whole thing waiting for even a mention, if not an interview.

But I did wonder about how potential advertisers (a big issue for the RiotACT at the moment) would feel about advertising on a site that is apparently unconcerned by the ethics of promoting these sorts of videos, and is instead chasing hits by whatever means are available.

There is an interesting ethical question about all this — and I guess it goes to the heart of running an open-contribution site like this.

Johnboy, as the main editor on the site, did you have ethical concerns about posting any of this stuff?