So for those not familiar with it, LinkedIn is an online networking site based around the equivalent of a CV. It’s very handy for storing business contacts and see what contacts they have. One of the really useful features of LinkedIn is LinkedIn answers where you can write a question and send it to all your contacts and the question is put on their site too and all LinkedIn members can respond to it. From feedback from those that use it, it’s a great resource. But you can only send the question and get a reply from those that are connected to you.

Photo owned by artifishall (cc)

What I’d love is the ability to send that question to my blog, my Twitter account, my Facebook status and more. It will get the question seen by a lot more people and probably get a good deal more responses too. It could also get more sign-ups for LinkedIn too and increase the number of people that connect to you. And I think it can be done thanks to LinkedIn releasing an API.

Of course that’s exporting from LinkedIn but is there anything stopping you from writing a blog post that gets turned into a LinkedIn Question or a Twitter message that does so?

In return GMail might more strongly ensure these newsletters don’t get marked as spam.

Maybe it’s out there already but I’d like a wordpress plugin for this blog that will allow me to to search using keywords for apt creative commons pics that I can use in blog posts. I’m tiring of my own text-only blog posts, there’s nothing like a picture to brighten things up but it’s a pain to find licence free pics.

So it would:
Bring me back a few photo options.
I’d pick the one I want.
It would then upload it, trim it (perhaps) and stick it into the blog post and give attribution.

Anyone know of such a plugin. Or want to make one?

Edit: Jazz Biscuit made this.

Which allowed me to do this after searching for “Dublin”:

Taken by: ralmonline

So how about setting up an online register for those that don’t want your flyers or any other flyer from a politician? NoFlyers.ie or something like that? Surely the Greens would support such an idea, wouldn’t they? Would they honour such a system? Would Bertie’s party do likewise since he is now not just a socialist but an environmentalist too?

If we build it, will they honour it? Think of the trees!

This one might be ideal for the RoadDeaths.ie website or the Road Safety Blog. Conor O’Neill mentioned a while back that on a trip over the bank holiday weekend from Bandon to Rosslare and back he didn’t see any Gardai. From a quick poll of my friends and colleagues it was the same. Hardly anyone encountered a Garda on the roads. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could document on map routes you traveled, what times and how little Gardai you saw on the way? I note that Jonathan did get a random breath test alright.

Create a bingo type card for the kids to play in the car too. It’d probably be a boring game for them with a blank card at the end of most journeys.

It was predicted and now it’s happening. More and more videos are being pulled from YouTube. Comedy Central are the guys with the big lawyers this time. So the Daily Show and the Colbert Report which from this side of the Atlantic are only popular due to the likes of YouTube, are now biting the hand that fed them. Little surprise there. This seems to be the same cycle again and again.

Years back Napster was the source for music online. Go there, tell it what you wanted. “Fuck copyright” people said (as did Napster). Napster delivered whatever you wanted. It achieved critical mass and it got served. Metallica and the record companies totaled it. Only right I suppose since copyright has strong legal protection. Bless lobbying! The weakest point of YouTube is that it is centralised, just like Napster. Take out the centre and the network collapses. Now with Google being the daddy it becomes easier again since they’re all corporate these days. They don’t want to be sued out of their 4 billion in cash or whatever is their current cash stockpile. In fairness Google has managed to licence some content but not all. YouTube will never have all content and Google will never be able to licence all the worlds information. Despite their aims.

We’ll see licenced content more and more on YouTube and less and less of the unlicenced. I think Google just bought this years model when it should be considering investing in the tech that is coming down the road. They bought obsolescence. It’s the creative types that are going to route around this legal roadblock and Google should have known this. I’m sure it’ll be the premier source for music videos and the like and some licenced TV shows. Wow. It will also have all the user generated stuff sans any music or clips from movie studios or record companies. Borrrrring. Soon you just might see 12 year olds getting cease and desists for lip-synching to Shakira songs.

So where will this unlicenced content go? Well, where did the unlicenced stuff go after Napster? Kazaa and the likes. Distributed networks. They in turn got shut down or infiltrated and spammed and became less useful. Then came along Bittorrent. Even more distributed. Distributed networks and distributed content. If you want something from BitTorrent your computer will go out and take bits of a song or video from different people and glue all these pieces back together. A much harder system to shut down than anything previously.

So I’m thinking maybe that’s where video is headed. Imagine an embedded video player on your site than doesn’t get its content from YouTube but goes about the web and downloads various pieces from 100s of different sources. How many lawyers and lawyer letters to then remove that content? How many Governments and ISPs would they need to pressure and lobby? You might be able to go after 100 sites and 100 servers but 1000, 10,000, 1 million? It’s an arms race against creativity and innovation. I look forward to my embedded website video player powered by Bittorrent. If content owners were clever they might try and make a business model out of this. Instead they’ll try and block it.

Bonus link. Seems the Google deal included lots of money to buy off the copyright holders.