Sunday, June 22, 2008

Should the Government Slap Google as New Evil Ads Hit YouTube.com?





Have you also been irritated at the evil Google ads that cover up 20% of the YouTube video you are trying to watch? The Google Evil Ads make me want to scream at the ones who perpetrated this over the top malady.

The problems with this concept are obvious. We, the users of Google, are coming to YouTube to see content produced by the public, so Google gets free content and traffic that they did not produce. Then, we the user have this pop up in our face taking up about 20% of our viewing area even though a 2 or 3 inch ad was to the right of the video. No, that's not enough for Google, even though we have made them two of the richest cats around in a short time. The billions and billions aren't enough for them, they have to push the envelope till they push us away. Even though they know that we hate forced pop ups, they do it because they can.

Google is apparently battling out having copyrighted content displaying on YouTube to begin with. When the courts see that Google is now superimposing an ad right across copyrighted material, how will it bode for their case? Thanks Google, we'd like to watch this content, but your overreaching greed make it a possibility that this we be taken away from the public.

Now, how will professional recording artists, publishers, actors and movie producers like Google making money running ads across content that Google doesn't pay royalties on? Is Google asleep at the wheel or just drunk on stupidity. In the photo above, one can see that this is a video that Gloria Estefan recorded but isn't getting paid a dime for it to run on YouTube.com. Google has ads everywhere on the page to begin with, but now they are blatantly stealing the royalties from artists without shame. How do you think Gloria Estefan would feel about Google making money off her recordings in this way? How can Google even fight for their right to host copyrighted material to their financial gain while the creator of the material gets hosed?

This reminds me of when the Google Checkout feature was added, only their own ads had a color logo in the Adsense ads when everyone else who was paying for an ad had to live with a boring text ad. Thanks again Google for taking advantage of those that pay your bills.

This blows my mind that Google would do something this offensive. What ever happened to their original model that Google will do no evil? Well, I think that went out the window a long time ago and it's too bad for the people that made them so successful.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Firefox 3 Download Day Official Time 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time



Firefox 3 Download Day is finally here. The official time the final release version will be available is 10 a.m. PDT, which is 1 p.m., Tuesday June 17th, 2008 on the East coast (New York).

Go to their promotional page for the Firefox 3 download Day and sign up and pledge to download it today because Mozilla is shooting for a world record in the most downloaded application in a single day.

Be a part of history and support this most admired browser that remains free and open sourced.
I will be downloading my copy today.