2008-03-07

MIT Free Culture.

Started at 17:10.

Present: price albertni dsheets peabo thwang deaner hawk | quentin driscoll

ROFLcon.

Tim: Officially decided to do it at MIT.  We got a bump in
  registrations after David sent email around MIT.  There's still
  maybe 100 spots, for a total of 450 registrants.  Several national
  media outlets are going to cover it.  I'll send a blurb; feel free
  to tell people and mailing lists.

  The schedule at http://roflcon.org/schedule is up to date
  and pretty detailed.


YouTomb.

Dean: About two nights ago Quentin pushed the new version to production;
  see http://youtomb.mit.edu/.  

Quentin: We should pick either youtomb.mit.edu or youtomb.org.
  I think we should keep the "MIT" in our domain.  The other should
  be a redirect.

Dean: We should set some goals and a launch date, on which we go forth
  and try to get slashdot, boingboing, etc coverage.  If we get the
  coverage in the meantime we'll roll with it.

  We want to (a) add features to browse (b) add search (c) start
  keeping track of the country-code filtering.  The country filtering
  is a more universal concern, so we should jump on it.

Greg: Once we have these base-system features, what can people do on
  top of that?

David: Database dump, so other people can do their own analysis.
Quentin: It may help to make the data smaller.

Quentin: More feeds.  Maybe one for every browse page.

Dean: One of my friends who does political mashups says he often
  doesn't hear from YouTube when things go down.  It'd be cool if
  YouTomb could help him.

Albert: With what we have, we could be attractive to technical users
  interested in analyzing the data, finding out what's going on, etc.
  And we can be a one-time carnival, that people look at once.
  Maybe we want to have a blog, and people might think it interesting
  and put the feed in their reader.
Kevin: Yeah, I think the "interesting takedowns" tack on that could be cool.
  Like that music video today uploaded from the artist's own "official"
  user account, then taken down by the RIAA -- we wouldn't even be
  making a judgement on it, it's just an oddity.
David: And it'd be something Slashdot could link to better than to
  "here's this site that does something".
Albert: Yeah, it'd be cool to say "hey, this country just started
  filtering" -- people'd be interested in that.
Quentin: We might even make the blog the front page.

Peter: A link to do a Google keyword search on the title, so the user
  can find out what some video is easily if it's taken down.

Dean: Wendy Seltzer is interested in adding YouTube queries to
  track the results of.
Quentin: Yeah, that's almost done.  The backend code is there, no UI.
Dean: Do we want this to be available to the public?
Quentin: I think we want even a bookmarklet for people in the public
  to add videos to track.  Queries, we might want to keep restricted.
  They're a lot of load.

Quentin: We should embed up videos in our video pages; makes it more
  fun to use, and no reason not to.

David: It'd also be cool if we could add our own comments to the
  video page, explaining what it was, after either searching the
  rest of the web or downloading the video privately.

Greg: I see a lot of videos down on blogs.  It'd be cool if YouTomb
  could make it easy for me to see why it's down.  Maybe alternate
  embed code, so that if we see that it's down the user sees not
  the useless down video, but an explanation of who took it down when.
David: Yeah, that'd be really useful.
Kevin: Maybe a WordPress plugin, adding another embed link on the editor.
David: As a flip side, for us to monitor their blogs, parse for embeds,
  mail them when stuff goes down.  (After they subscribe to this.)
Tim: This wrapper thing would be so powerful, we might want to have
  it ready by release time, so it's there when we get the most attention.


Dean: OK, which of these do we want before the big press outreach?

Albert: The blog, definitely.  It's not even that hard.

Tim: The takedown services / embed wrapper for blogs.
Albert: That's important.  How hard do we think it'll be, though?
David: I can work on it.

Dean: I want browse.  I think that'll be helpful in particular for
  exposing the country-code stuff, which is important.
David: It could be a lot of work, though.
Albert: I think this is not as big as the blog takedown services;
  the latter will let people start using YouTomb and have it stick.
  And say five bloggers do that, that's five more ways other people
  can see YouTomb in the future, without another slashdotting or anything.

Tim: Yeah, I think it's two things: you put in a blog,
  and you do the wrapper.  Then you're ready.
David: Then there's a lot of easy features too: like embed
  an up video in the video page, make claimant mentions be links,
  a keyword search that just goes to Google.

Tim: Maybe we want to go into stealth mode, and not risk premature
  publicity before we finish those two components.
Dean: Say, replacing the front page with just the scanner, with no
  links, and a "coming soon" label.  Or even a static "coming soon".
David: Yeah, it'd really suck if we got the early press.  These
  outlets like Slashdot, BoingBoing, Reddit don't cover things twice
  so easily as once.
OK, we're doing that.


Ended at 18:19.