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Tudou is by far the most popular web-based video site here in China, boasting similar traffic numbers as Youtube.

One of the big reasons is you can watch full episodes of TV, movies and songs. For instance, many of my students enjoy “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” and the guys can watch all of the 007 movies… por gratis.

And this is no fly by night operation, as heavy hitters such as VW and Dell actively advertise on the site. In addition, Google is trying to get people to switch from Baidu, here is one ad I just saw:

This is part of Google’s campaign in which they allow China-based users to listen to high-quality songs for free. On the right side the Red tab is for Chinese music, Yellow is Western, Green is Japanese, and Blue is for Korean.

With any luck, Chinese firms (including P2P groups) will be able to withstand lawsuits that their Swedish and American counterparts have succumbed to.

Btw: a quick piece of trivia, “tudou” is Chinese for potato… a word I quickly learned when ordering food. Love the spud.

See also: Stealing Music: Is It Wrong Or Isn’t It?
A Book that Changes Everything (Jeff Tucker’s live blog review)
Against Intellectual Property (pdf)
Oh the irony

Courtesy of the latest skinny on Google’s mammoth datacenters.

Regarding their infrastructure my favorite quote continues to be: “Server makers pride themselves on their high-end machines’ ability to withstand failures, but Google prefers to invest its money in fault-tolerant software.”

And in the long run, that probably will be their greatest competitive advantage.

In the past six weeks I’ve conducted at least 1802 searches (according to my history cache). And it’s not all for super sexy helicopter porn or aesthetically unappealing crocks.

I mention this because today Sergey Brin mentioned that one of the reasons Google has so-far weathered the economic downturn:

Let me highlight search improvements in last 90 days. have launched more than 100 improvements in search quality. New tailored home pages in international markets, such as Japan. Also better job in foreign countries selecting domestic results.

I can only imagine how many searches someone like Justin Raimondo does (his articles are, in the words of Gene Callahan: link portals).

Speaking of which, I haven’t written a single new article in that time frame (the 3 previous Mises articles this year were all written in the first week of February)… so my quarterly numbers are skewed!

Incidentally, I sat in a noisy internet cafe next to several middle-aged chain smokers (who were farming gold in WoW) for a solid week between teaching hours to whip the Pulitzer-prize winning pieces together. The green tea and steroids helped.

As an aside, unless it was Scarlet Johannson in a bikini, I don’t think I clicked on any web ad. Who clicks on ads?

Remember that cludgy old Newton? I had one for a year, back in 1995, and found it be of little use — aside from its inherent paperweight abilities and the obligatory game of Tetris during geometry class.

Now that Apple has released the anticipated iPod Touch, which is basically the iPhone sans phone-abilities, is this basically what a PDA should be like? Or is it just the opposite?

As far as the phone capabilities go, since it has WiFi built into it, all some enterprising individual(s) needs to do now is create a VoIP hack that allows you to do the unthinkable. Right?

Skype is already available in a duct-tape fashion for the iPhone. And some guys at Google (and Facebook) have helped spearhead the development of useful iPhone apps (despite rumors that Google itself developing an OS for the mobile segment).

I plan on grabbing the Touch within the next week or so and am crossing my fingers that a hack will be available shortly (so much cheaper and convenient for international calls…).

The only thing I wish that had been included was a digital camera, even a dinky one. [I already have a phone and don't care for virtual keyboards (I played around with an iPhone before I left the West, I'll stick with a meatspace QWERTY)].

In the past, I have helped maintain several pages on Wikipedia for various organizations. In addition to adding new content, most of the work was simply geared towards keeping vandals at bay.

Reinventing the information wheel

I believe the carte blanche policy of giving anonymous users the ability to edit every page should be changed. Some of these changes could be as simple as requiring that users sign on through a captcha, IP-stamped system. Or even easier, create a new function within the Wiki software, to where anyone can “suggest” changes, but these changes will not go into effect without the approval of a moderator.

In fact, a variation of this last example is currently being tested by the German edition of Wikipedia and is expected to be implemented in other editions within the coming months.

The online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has also adopted this “suggest a change” into their system (example), and I would suspect that this has helped them further refine their otherwise top-notch articles.

However, despite this change, based upon my own unscientific observations, Britannica is not even close to winning the all important traffic-based popularity contest. For instance, whenever I use a search engine, Wikipedia articles rank much higher than those of Encyclopedia Britannica (in fact, I honestly cannot recall ever seeing an EB result on the first SERP).

And while some may say each of these organizations is trying to cater to a different clientele, that would be nonsensical in this age of dying gatekeepers and open access. [Note: another article could discuss the differences between the structure of article layout between the two behemoths; accuracy is another issue altogether]

The Man vs. Fanboys

While Wikipedia currently enjoys holding the lofty status as the alternative to the Establishment – the Corporate world that Britannica supposedly represents – the capital resources expended in maintenance and upkeep come, by-and-large through donations by firms such as Google and Yahoo. So the “free” nomenclature is not entirely accurate (kind of similar to GNU/Linux vs Microsoft and the economic opportunity costs in development).

However, arguably the most important change EB could implement for increasing traffic and thus increasing potential ad revenue is to open up their Walled Garden (they charge for “full access”). Answers.com makes a killing this way, Encarta has also adopted this model, and The New York Times is toying with this as well. They could even strike a monetary deal with a search engine to integrate and improve upon their lackluster offering.

If EB wanted to stay in the world of academia (which their area for “suggestions” leans heavily towards), they could set other restrictions in place, such as: limit contributors to .edu addresses, have several moderator/contributor levels based upon peer karma, longevity, etc.

See also: 1 2 3 and Murray Rothbard’s criticism of the theory linear history advocated by Whigs.

Note: Michael Arrington has some thoughtworthy (sic) comments regarding Nupedia, Citizendium and Digital Universe.

And as a last aside, structurally EB could branch out and perhaps set up a business akin to Techdirt’s information consulting service.

I have it.

Here is a brief description of what it is.

Google’s “advanced” search options give a user the ability to fine-tune health-related search terms.  See also their useful co-op program.

I played around on Google’s Image Labeler a little bit more since it launched 24 hours ago.

Here are the results thus far:

You get 100 points for everytime you and your random partner successfully tag a photo. Thus, I’ve labeled 129 photos so far.

The overall leader board looks like this:

If you do the math, Google has nearly 6000 images tagged by the top 5 alone in addition to at least 125,000 other photos tagged by 1000 people.

So exactly how many people have labeled images now? I decided to change my identity by logging into a different GMail account as RickyBobbyNASCAR. As seen here:

After labeling 76 photos, my alter ego is still not ranked individually for one reason or another, so it is difficult to say how many people are currently using this (maybe the threshold contains only the Top 1000).

I do have to say that some of the people that label pictures have no clue about geography. A map of a tropical storm was shown with a path projected to hit the eastern coast. Kentucky was not on the map, yet it was listed as an “off-limit” word… which usually means alot of people have typed Kentucky as a label. Also, Wink was the best teammate by far (kept bumping into him).

Note: regarding numbers, Luis von Ahn (creator of this system) estimated that it would only take 2 months for Google to properly tag all of their hundreds of millions of photos with a paltry 5000 users.  In 24 hours alone, they have done at least 131,000.

Not too shabby.

In my previous post I mentioned the automation and assembly of seemingly tedious tasks into a useful product.

Turns out that about a month ago, a guy by the name of Luis von Ahn visited Google and gave a talk to a group of its employees. Luis is the creator of a computer game called the ESP Game, which does exactly what Google Image Labeler does (though after playing both, I think his version has a better layout/design).

His talk is very effective, as he really makes you think outside the box in terms of spinning mundane tasks into productive creations (see for instance, his statistics on how much time is wasted playing solitaire).

Addendum: according to Danny Sullivan, Google recently licensed the technology from von Ahn for their own uses.

Do you recall the old timey Tom Sawyer character from the novel’s of Mark Twain?

Remember how he managed to get a group of his friends to paint a fence for him?

Somehow, Google has managed to do the same things with its ginormous database of images through a new program called Google Image Labeler.

The idea is simple, yet ingenious. Google has a system in which you gain irredeemable points for every image you tag.

You log into their system and label images with a few keywords. And you are also paired off with a random person as well. If you think about it, this helps diversify the pool of words that can be used, and it can help highlight users whom are merely pranksters.

The bottom line for Google is that they get to use the labor of its zealous fan base for free, whereas Amazon pays users to do the same thing.

Brilliant.

Business 2.0 has a really good write-up of all the blog-enterprises that are now funded through advertisements.

The main reason for their success: these blog cater to specific niches, thus the ads can be targeted to specific demographics much more effectively.  It is the Long Tail of advertising, what Chris Anderson calls “nichification.”

Via The Paradigm Shift