Originally the service was due to close to visitors on April 29th with another two weeks for users to download their videos (until May 13th). Those dates have now been scrapped but it’s obvious the direction this is heading in. So, if you need to, save any videos you have on there while you still can.

When the closure happens, anyone who has linked to any content on Google Video or has embedded videos on their pages will end up with a bunch of links that don’t work or that redirect somewhere else.

Google is wealthy and could easily keep this service running so those pages and videos are online ‘forever’. But it’s a commercial company and primarily concerned about its image and business plan.

If you want a sustainable presence online in the longterm, get proper web hosting, run your own website and link to your content on there. That way, you are in control and really building something for the future.

You won’t be handing over rights in your content or suddenly have the rug pulled from under you at a few weeks notice. How long before Facebook goes the way of MySpace?

Meanwhile, Amazon’s cloud continues to be down for some customers.

Crash 2.0: Amazon battles to restore confidence in cloud computing as web chaos continues into second day Daily Mail.

‘At a computer conference in Alexandria, Virginia, Stefan Savage, a computer security expert who led the “Sneakey” project, surfed the photo-sharing website Flickr and found pictures that clearly showed peoples’ keys, even if personal information in the shots had been blurred out.

In one demonstration, the team cut duplicate keys after analysing images taken on a mobile phone. In another, they used a telephoto lens to take pictures of a set of keys on a cafe table from the roof of a university building.’

The Guardian: Copying keys from photos is child’s play

‘Scientists have devised a cheap and simple method of turning water into rocket fuel using solar power in a development that could generate a new source of green energy for the home and workplace.’

The Independent.

As I remember the horribly invasive player that is Apple Quicktime for Windows, I was in two minds about whether to try Safari. But I did…

Well it’s a piece of junk so far. When I start it, the top menus have white text on a white background, so I can’t see or do anything.

OK so it’s a beta. It may be fixed next time. Maybe it’s some quirk of my system. But I can’t remember the last time I tried beta software and it presented me with a bug as stupid as this one.

So safari has been uninstalled. I’ll stick with Opera and Firefox.

Other reviews say it seems like a ‘rushed if not a botched’ job.

Read more...

Scientists demand inquiry over Wi-Fi

Birds and bees are hit by phone waves

Britain becoming a Big Brother society, says data watchdog

April was the hottest in 350 years

Online sales ‘will hit £78bn’

Deluge of complaints on minimum wage abuse

In a nutshell, U.S. intelligence found that Saudi Arabia was funding Pakistan’s development of the bomb. They were told to back off (as we know, Bush is a big friend of the Saudis) and Pakistan’s Dr. Khan subsequently sold the technology to Libya and North Korea.

In all the hype that surrounded Rocketboom in its first year online, there was one question that always went unanswered.

Print articles and TV reports were in awe of the show. Breathlessly, they told us how it was produced in an ordinary living room, had a quarter of a million viewers each day and yet cost just $20-$50 to make. Some even suggested that the main expense was photographic light-bulbs.

Andrew, the creator and producer of Rocketboom, was quoted as saying he spent some 8-14 hours making each five-minute episode. Which will be no surprise to anyone who has been involved in the time-consuming business of making television programmes or video.

But, as they predicted a rash of ‘user-generated’ Rocketboom-style programmes coming to a website near you, what none of these ‘anyone can do it’ reports ever asked, was how did the people behind Rocketboom pay the rent and buy food?

It was clear that making Rocketboom was a full-time job. After a year, I began to wonder. Did Rocketboom have a financial backer who had given them start-up cash? Was Andrew a rich-kid who didn’t have to worry about earning a living? Were they all on welfare?

Of course money isn’t everything, but eventually it became clear they did want to earn an income from the show.

As a video blog, Rocketboom has been a spectacular success. A phenomenon and I wholeheartedly congratulate Andrew and Amanda on what they did. But, as a business, it represents a missed opportunity of quite staggering proportions. I read they made about $80,000 from the one ad they had so far.

To be running for eighteen months, with 300,000 viewers per day, five days per week, and make only that, is just mind-boggling. With Google ads you can make $500 a year from a website that only gets 50 visitors a day…

History is littered with the tales of people who had great ideas or creativity, but failed to do what was necessary to turn those into an income. Rocketboom gave away its product under a creative commons licence. Its website and show usually carried no ads. It seems to me that the only valuable asset is the ‘brand’ and Amanda Congdon is a huge part of that.

Now the bubble has burst. Occasionally Rocketboom was brilliant (Amanda dancing in Russia), but often it was a bit too off-the-wall and left us scratching our heads in bemusement. Andrew was an expert on the RSS distribution side of things, with the result that Rocketboom was the first to make it big. It was a novelty and highly popular for that reason. That iconic combination of Amanda and the map… They captured a moment in time and I fear that moment is now over.

If I was Amanda, I would start making a new online show right now while she is so much in the public eye. If I was Andrew, I would sell the Rocketboom show, archives (which don’t have a lot of value because they are so topical) and domain name and split the money with Amanda, while they still have the chance to make some money from this. Otherwise Rocketboom is going to begin a slow fade into history without making either of them rich.

The worst thing would be to get tied up in a legal case for several years, by which time there will be nothing left to carve up. Time is of the essence for both of them…