Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I’m not usually very political.  I don’t care much about elections, campaigns, politics or policies, and things like that.  But that didn’t stop me from watching the USA presidency candidate talks at Google.  Here are the names and what I think  of them:

• Ron Paul.  This was the only video that I watched in full length.  This guy speaks good, and he has plenty of common sense in him.  He’s also pretty popular on the Web, but, somehow, I doubt that he will make it to the president.  He and his campaign contradict the interests of too many people.
• Hillary Clinton.  She speaks like a politician with a lot of experience.  That’s probably why I don’t understand much of her.  Watched the video for about 10 minutes.
• Barack Obama.  I don’t have much interest in hearing how he reads “I think” and “I believe” of the paper.  He looked very much like someone who haven’t written those notes…
• John Edwards.  This is the case of one picture being a thousand words. It’s much easier and faster to say “I don’t believe that guy” after taking half a second look at him, than listening to an hour of him talking.

I’ve mentioned this many times before and, I guess, I’ll need to mention this ever more - the technological progress of the recent years (the digital world, yes) has left many systems of our society behind.  Educational and legal are the most noticeable.   Here are a few words in the insightful and funny video (originally from the Ted.com - a place of many more insightful videos).  Here is a quote from a recent Boing Boing post showing the state of the legal system:

… pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without permission.

TechCrunch has an excellent cover of the “photograph in the video” story that has been going on all over the web in the last few days.  Basically, somebody wrote a funny song and made a video for it.  In that video a bunch of images were used including one that was downloaded from Flickr without permission of the photographer.  The photographer got really pissed off and such.  The video was re-edited to remove the offending image, but there was plenty of discussion on how is right and who is wrong in this story.  Some really important questions on copyright, fair use, and free speech were asked, and some really smart people tried to answer them.

The rights of the copyright holder have always been balanced against the more fundamental right of free speech. And free speech in the Internet age, more so than ever before, goes way beyond words and text. The way people express themselves on the Web increasingly involves images, video, animations, and other rich media, often in mash-ups of pre-existing works. That is how people communicate today. Both copyright law and industry standards need to evolve to take that into consideration.

While I support the (copy)right of the author to command the usage of his or her work, I think that this particular case wasn’t handled properly by the photographer.

Common Craft created yet another amazing 3-minute video.  This time they explain what a blog is, in plain English.  This is really useful for those of us who bring new people to the blogosphere.  After being around for a few years, it’s sometimes hard to express things in simple words, avoiding most of the terminology, and staying on the subject.  With this video, there is much less talking needed.

If you liked this one, check their Explanations in Plain English category for more videos.

Normally, I would just bookmark the site with del.icio.us and wait until it will get into my daily dumps here and be done with it. But not WIMP.com.

This one is special. If you look at it - there is nothing fancy. The design is simple. No features like user registration, banners, or automatically syndicated news from other sources.

All it has are pictures, flash animations and games, and short video clips. And it’s the video clips that did it for me. Short, amateur, often of terrible quality, but interesting and to the point.

Some say that today’s kids have an attention span of 3 seconds. Well, I don’t blame them. With so much stuff out there - do you need any more? Learn to express yourself. If you need more than 3 seconds of attention span, you aren’t targeting today’s kids. Change, if you have to.

Anyway, go and check that site out. I guarantee you that your productivity will drop tremendiously. There is just no way to stop. You can’t have enough. At least I. The only thing that might keep you in reality is your bandwidth monitor. If your traffic is expensive, skip it now.

Let me know what’s your favourite clip, by the way.