Monday, December 11, 2006

Google tools

Official Google Search Tools

Special Searches

  • Google Video - Search TV programs and videos
  • Google Image Search - comprehensive image search on the web
  • Google Music Search - search for music
  • Google Book Search - Search the full text of books (and discover new ones).
  • Google Catalogs - helps you browse and search merchant-provided catalogs
  • Froogle - Google’s shopping search engine
  • Google News - Search and browse 4,500 news sources
  • Google Scholar - search for the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
  • Google Maps - View maps, get driving directions, and search for local businesses and services.
  • Google Public Service Search - offers educational institutions and non-profit organizations worldwide free SiteSearch, which enables users to search your website, and free WebSearch, which enables users to search the Internet.
  • Google’s University Search - enables you to narrow your search to a specific school website for things like admissions information, course schedules, or alumni news.
  • Google Ride Finder - view taxi or shuttle locations in several cities.
  • Google Base - submit all types of online and offline content that is hosted and made searchable online.

Google Topic Specific Search

Google For Webmasters

  • Google AdSense for search - Opportunity to earn money by Google whenever your users click on the targeted Google adsense ads on search results pages.
  • Google Free - provide Google search results to users who want to search the web or just your website.
  • Site-flavored Google search - delivers web search results that are customized to individual websites.
  • Customizable Google Search - you can customize your results display to include background, text and link colors you select.
  • Google Search Appliance - is a hardware and software product designed to offer large businesses the productivity-enhancing power of Google search.
  • Google Mini – Google search for your website and intranet

Google Desktop Search Tools

  • Google Deskbar - Search using Google without opening your browser
  • Google Desktop - a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed.

Google Mobile Search Services

Google Search Toolbars

Third party Google Search Tools

Search Google with Firefox Extensions

  • CustomizeGoogle - enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).
  • Googlebar Lite - A light-weight Google search toolbar for Firefox.
  • GoogleTabs - Adds a context menu option to open Google search results in tabs.
  • Advanced Dork - Highlight a word or phrase, right click, and choose from over 15 Advanced Google Operators, A google search page is opened in either the same tab or a new tab, the results contained in the search will contain the highlighted text inside the chosen Operator.
  • GooglePreview - Inserts preview images (thumbnails) of web sites and Amazon products into the Google and Yahoo search results pages.
  • Feeling Lucky - Performs Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” search with any selected text and opens the result in new a tab.
  • Aggregate Yahoo! and Google - Search Yahoo and Google simultaneously
  • GooglebarL10N - is the localized version of Googlebar with Menues & Texts in German, Italian or Spanish.
  • Google Advanced Operations Toolbar - provides a shortcut to some of Google’s advanced search functions.

Google Page Modules / Scripts / Widgets / Bookmarklets

Multi Search Tools

  • Simply Google - search all Google services on one page. Lots of forms.
  • HotDaddy - search all Google services on one page. Lots of icons.
  • Google Total - search all Google services on one page. Drop down menu.
  • GahooYoogle - search multiple Google and Yahoo services together side by side.
  • Twingine - Google and Yahoo search side by side.
  • Soople - performs all advanced search functions of google in separate forms

Miscellaneous Google Search Tools

  • Google Cloudnew1.gif - displays search results as a tag cloud
  • Babelplex - enables users to search Google’s web index across two languages.
  • Google Current - airs every half hour on Current TV and provides a look at what the world is searching for on Google.
  • Googlewhack - a query consisting of two words (without quotation marks) entered into Google’s search page that returns a single result.
  • Cookin’ With Google - allows you to provide a list of ingredients and get back a list of recipes that Google finds for you.
  • Goofresh - is a way to search for sites added today, yesterday, within the last seven days, or last 30 days.
  • Google Fight - Compare the number of results for two competing keywords.
  • GoogleDuel - a popularity contest using the Google search engine.
  • Random Web Search - it generates a random word, then searches that word on the web using Google.
  • Googlematic - Enables searching of Google via AIM or MSN Messenger.
  • Googlism - will find out what Google.com thinks of you
  • Google Tool - Search multiple google datacenters simultaneously.
  • elgooG - a mirror image of Google
  • LostGoggles - adds search site preview images, Amazon pricing, site info links and the Open-in-New-Window-button. Formerly “More Google”.

In the end, this amazing list of Google Web Search Features lists the many special features to help you to find exactly what you’re looking for. Google Zeitgeist lists the current Google Search patterns, trends, and surprises.

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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

SEO check links

Pages Indexed
MPUK
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.michaelpage.co.uk&hl=en
Reed
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Awww.reed.co.uk
Hays
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Awww.hays.com
Rob Walters
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Awww.robertwalters.co.uk
Total Jobs
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Awww.totaljobs.com
Jobsite
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Awww.jobsite.co.uk

Yahoo inLinks
Accountancyadditions.com

Michael Page UK

Reed

Hays

Rob Walters

Total Jobs

Jobsite
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Tuesday, November 21, 2006

The Brit with the Midas internet touch

Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital has made stellar returns from investing in online ventures but warns against too much optimism in the sector. Paul Durman reports from San Francisco
NI_MPU('middle');
YOUTUBE has been good to Mike Moritz — and not just because his investment firm made an estimated $500m (£260m) when the video-sharing website was bought by Google last month.
Moritz, a senior partner at Sequoia Capital, is Silicon Valley’s pre-eminent venture capitalist, whose successes include both Yahoo and Google, where he remains a director. But he grew up in Cardiff and, unlike his accent, his affection for British sport has survived more than 25 years in California.
“The greatest thing that’s happened is that now on Monday morning I can watch all the soccer highlights on YouTube,” he said last week. “That’s what technology brings. You never used to be able to get the Premiership here.”
Online video is much more than just a good way of catching up with last night’s game. “I used to follow Glamorgan as a little kid,” said Moritz. “I remember vividly Gary Sobers hitting six sixes in a row. I didn’t know a video existed of that — and found it on the web in black and white. It was wonderful.
“There’s stuff from Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones from the early 1960s. It’s fantastic — a treasure trove of personal memories that are being rediscovered.”
YouTube was the poster child of last week’s Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco — a showcase for the companies that are inventing our digital future. The sell-out conference, now in its third year, was attended by 1,000 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and representatives of the big technology firms.
The organisers had to turn away 5,000 more who were willing to pay $3,300 to hear from a stellar cast of speakers that included Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Yahoo co-founder David Filo.
Just as compelling for many of those attending was the chance to learn from the new wave of internet entrepreneurs who have helped to define what has become known as Web 2.0 — people like Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist, which has revolutionised classified advertising; Caterina Fake, who founded the photo-sharing site Flickr; and Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, a fast-growing news site.
The mood, if not triumphalist, was full of optimism. Fittingly it was Schmidt, the head of the web’s most important company, who put the case most succinctly. “Don’t bet against the internet,” he said.
In America at least, the term Web 2.0 has become so widely used in business and technology circles that it is in danger of being drained of its original meaning. At its simplest, Web 2.0 is a collective noun for the new generation of internet companies that includes Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace and YouTube.
What these companies have in common is that they have all grown explosively fast thanks to the contribution made by their users. The encyclopedia entries written by the Wikipedia community, the profile pages created by MySpace users, the photos and videos uploaded to Flickr and YouTube — all this activity creates services that become richer, more compelling or more useful with every day.
This powerful feedback loop — known by technologists as a network effect — helps to explain the rapid growth of these start-ups. Wikipedia (founded in 2001), MySpace (2003) and YouTube (2005) are among the 20 most popular sites on the internet.
Tim O’Reilly, the technology publishing guru whose company helped stage Web 2.0, and which coined the phrase in 2004, said the key was “harnessing collective intelligence — harnessing network effects to build applications that get better the more people use them”.
The companies behind the new web-based applications are constantly making refinements and improvements, guided by feedback from their users.
The contrast with Microsoft’s traditional approach could not be more stark. Last month, Microsoft finally released the latest version (7.0) of Internet Explorer — more than five years after the browser last underwent a major upgrade. Rival browsers, notably Firefox, have long been offering better features than Microsoft’s dated product.
Even more embarrassing for Microsoft have been the delays to Windows Vista, the new version of the dominant computer- operating system. Ironically, it was during Web 2.0 last week that Microsoft announced that Vista was at last ready to be “released to manufacturing” — years behind schedule. The company admitted that Vista’s five years in development did not mean that it would be free of bugs when it is launched.
Many of the companies displaying their wares at Web 2.0 were offering new ways to manage, organise or share content. For example, Vox is a new blogging service that allows users to incorporate audio, video and other content from other web services such as Amazon, YouTube and Flickr.
Instructables is a website that allows users to share their knowledge of how to make things — from cakes to cupboards, and from kites to kayaks. Klostu, a sister company to Israel’s BoardTracker.com, is a message-board specialist that enables you to find and interact with people who have similar interests to your own.
3B — the only British firm among the 13 featured in Web 2.0’s launchpad workshop — offers a way to turn your MySpace profile page into a three-dimensional space. So instead of just having a list of your friends, you — or your avatar — can “walk” round a virtual room whose walls are papered with your friends’ profiles, or with pictures imported from Flickr.
Read on on page 2...
Chief executive Nicky Morris, who previously ran Formula1.com before selling out to Bernie Ecclestone, said that 3B’s browser could also be used to create 3-D shops — taking online shopping into a new era.
Outside Silicon Valley’s technology capsule, many of these innovations would probably be greeted with bemusement. But an older, more conservative generation struggles to see the attraction of MySpace and its rivals, even as the networking sites bite chunks out of the time previously given over to watching television.
Mike Moritz was not among the deal- hungry venture capitalists looking for the next YouTube at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel last week. Asked what Web 2.0 means to him, he replied: “Nothing — less than zero. Falling romantically in love with buzz phrases tends to be a fairly painful experience in our business.”
He added: “People don’t see the carcasses and the smouldering ruins on the side of the road. And there are plenty of those.”
Sequoia has a virtually unmatched record that stretches back decades. Its many successful investment vehicles — some proudly displayed on a tape-loop playing on a screen in the reception of its offices — include Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, the contract manufacturing giant Flextronics, the graphics chip designer Nvidia and the database software company Oracle.
Moritz prefers to talk about the investments that went wrong. “We could run a long reel of failures as well,” he said. “Maybe it’s just that we have made more mistakes than everybody else and try not to make the same mistake twice. If we’re so good, I keep wondering why we still have write-offs.”
There is more to this than British self- deprecation. Moritz said Sequoia has “a perpetual fear of going out of business”, and constantly tries to “bake” anxiety into its partners, “hour by hour”.
“It’s like any business that’s been around for a long time. It’s all too easy to become complacent, to ease off, to delude yourself into thinking that the world won’t change, to forget about the fact that there are people far hungrier than you. Before you know it, you’re in a death spiral.”
Moritz is unimpressed by the optimism sweeping through Silicon Valley. “This comes in waves,” he said.
“Right now, people have forgotten how bleak things were when they were really dark, and you have a whole set of newcomers who didn’t participate in the last debacle. It’s right there, a little bit further down the road.”
He was equally keen to puncture the impression that Silicon Valley is an easy place to make money in the venture-capital business. “Much of it is a façade,” he said. “In many places in the venture-capital business, life is grim or worse. The results of 25 years don’t lie. The returns on the whole broad swath of the venture industry are miserable.”
What he does believe in is great entrepreneurs — wherever they come from and regardless of their experience.
Sequoia’s website states: “Almost everyone we have ever invested in has been a complete unknown at the time we met. Many have been immigrants or first-generation Americans with barely a penny to their name.”
This belief in undiscovered talent partly reflects Moritz’s own experience. After studying history at Oxford, and moving to America to take an MBA, he spent four years as a journalist working for Time magazine before establishing a company that published technology newsletters.
Despite his lack of a relevant background, Sequoia was prepared to give him his break in venture capital “It’s no coincidence that Steve Jobs was 19 years old when he started Apple, or that Larry [Page] and [Sergey] Brin at Google were 23 and 24, or [Yahoo founders] Jerry Yang and David Filo were in their mid- twenties. There’s nothing that beats the spirit of those sorts of people. That isn’t something that is acquired with experience and with age. That’s the stuff you cannot supply. All the other stuff can be supplied — the money, the management, the filler.”
He cites, as “the most shining example”, the revival at Apple since Jobs returned to the company in 1997 — “what happens when a founder is sent into the wilderness and then when he returns. That’s such an extraordinary story and an illustration of the impact of one person. Steve is one incredibly magnificent businessman.”
Similarly, Moritz is dismissive of his own role in the building of Google. “99.99% of whatever has been accomplished at Google, which has been so spectacular, should be laid squarely on the doorstep of Larry and Sergey.
“I know I failed to appreciate the depth of the insight that they conveyed, and also failed to understand the size of the business that might be assembled.”
Moritz is unwilling to discuss his role in the acquisition of YouTube, or to spell out the sectors where Sequoia sees the best opportunities in the years ahead. However, the firm has opened offices in India and China in the past couple of years and clearly sees a shift in the centre of gravity in the technology business.
“Over the past 30 years America has had a virtual monopoly on the construction of the most valuable technology companies in the world, and that grip will lessen over the next 20 years. We want to be shareholders in the most valuable technology companies, wherever they are,” said Moritz.
On page 3: Why Silicon Valley can't be copied...
SILICON VALLEY CAN’T BE COPIED
AS one of the world’s most successful technology investors, Mike Moritz is often asked how other countries can recreate Silicon Valley in their own backyards.
In his office on the Sand Hill Road near San Jose — venture-capital country — Moritz said last week: “People come by or send letters or ask about how to re-pot what works in Silicon Valley in some municipality in
Japan, or in South America, or parts of Europe, or in Britain.”
George Osborne, the Conservative shadow chancellor, is one of those who has dropped in to see Moritz.
Politicians are not the only visitors. Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, fast emerging as Europe’s leading technology venture investor, has offered to arrange a meeting to give Moritz a chance to inspire British entrepreneurs. Rimer said last week: “Mike Moritz is probably the best investor in venture-capital history. Whether it’s his own companies, like Yahoo and Google, or his firm’s, like YouTube, Mike has been associated with the majority of the most important companies on the internet.”
Moritz has so far resisted Rimer’s entreaties, even though both men have invested alongside one another. And he is sceptical about the chances of exporting Silicon Valley.
“People don’t understand. Most of our companies are not overnight successes even when they become very well known. It’s the same with Silicon Valley. You’re not going to be able to put it in a bottle and go and sprinkle it on parched earth that hasn’t been properly fertilised.”
Moritz said the biggest single requirement is a willingness and desire to start companies.
An immigrant himself, Moritz also places great importance on the drive that is found in the many newcomers to California. “You couple visible examples of success with an immigrant’s drive, and all that pent-up need and hunger, and I don’t think it gets a lot more complicated than that.”
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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Useful BI blog

Chris Webb's BI Blog



MDXtreme Programming!
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How to Watch YouTube on Your iPod





With a few minutes of work, it's easy to watch YouTube videos on your iPod. Here's how.

Note- This only works on iPod Video (even though the picture depicts an iPod Nano)


Steps

Windows

  1. Download and install the free Firefox web browser.
  2. Install the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox.
  3. Go to www.userscripts.org and install the Download YouTube Video script.
  4. The next time you watch YouTube, you'll see a Download Video option beneath the screen. Click it to save the file to your computer. You might want to rename the video to something descriptive.
  5. An alternative method for steps 1-4 that works for all browsers is to copy the YouTube URL for the video you want to download and then go to YouTubeX.com. Paste the URL to extract the file from YouTube and click "Get Video!" to save it to your computer.
  6. Install and launch the free Super video converter (www.erightsoft.com). Download is located here. You may be unable to download as this site is blocked by most spyware blocker programs. Although it does not appear to infect your computer.
  7. Select Apple - iPod from the Output Container option, and then the output video codec H.264/AVC. Set size to 320 x 240. If you get an error message when converting, unclick the Use DirectShow button.
  8. Drag the converted file into iTunes and it's ready for viewing.

Mac OS X

  1. Go to a YouTube video page, wait for it to load, and open Safari's Activity window.
  2. Double-click the URL of the video file - it's the largest one - to download it.
  3. Rename the file to something more descriptive.
  4. Drag and drop it into the free iSquint converter (www.isquint.org) and - presto! - an iPod-optimized video file for your iTunes library.


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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Cool sounding Website optimiser tool...
announcement-from-emetrics-summit.html
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Sunday, October 15, 2006

A fakers' guide to mastering office politics

Forget hard work. Playing the people game is often the fastest way to climb the greasy pole, writes Mary Braid

WHEN it comes to career progression, there is no shortage of advice about time management, presentation skills and sheer hard graft.

However, the single biggest factor determining how far we climb up the ladder, according to business psychologist Rob Yeung, is “other people”.

Yeung argues that however much we might want to deny it, the reality is that colleagues have a far greater impact on our careers than how hard we work or how talented we are.

“A lot of people like to think that their organisations are not political and that they can get on without being political. But the fact is that the most hard-working people do not make it to the top — it’s the politically savvy that get there,” he says.

“You have to learn to look at colleagues and consider what is driving their behaviour. You have to understand their professional and personal agendas.”

According to Yeung’s new book, The Rules of Office Politics, colleagues have never been trickier to deal with because of the pressures that organisational change, mergers, downsizing, outsourcing and globalisation have brought to both the private and public sectors.

These pressures have turned the workplace into “a minefield of treacherous personalities, unexploded resentments and ticking egos”, and understanding office politics and what makes colleagues tick has never been more important.

The trick, Yeung suggests, is to discover what colleagues’ “little hot buttons are” and then press them.

He offers a host of tips for handling other people, and claims colleagues can be divided into four types — bigwigs, rising stars, no-hopers and has-beens — depending on their level of influence and seniority in an organisation. He suggests the ambitious should cultivate relationships with influential bigwigs and rising stars, but waste no time on no-hopers and has-beens.

Understanding the political landscape of an organisation is crucial, he says, and when gathering intelligence — about who likes or hates who, who is on the up or on the skids and so on — Yeung recommends that the ambitious work on showing a genuine interest in people. He also suggests they encourage colleagues to divulge their innermost thoughts, particularly when their guards are down — when workmates are drunk, tired or emotional.

Yeung believes that attentiveness is the way to becoming a targeted colleague’s best friend. He even offers tips on how to fake it.

“You probably aren’t really interested in their diet/new curtains/recent yoga retreat/groin operation,” said Yeung. “But if you aren’t interested, at least pretend by using ‘active listening’ cues. Lift your eyebrows and ‘flash’ your eyes occasionally to signify that you understand what is being said. Nod intermittently to encourage them to continue ... use verbal cues such as ‘uh-huh’, ‘mmm’ and ‘yes’ to reassure them you are hanging on their every word.”

For those who might recognise the dog-eat-dog workplace that Yeung describes but feel a touch queasy about blatant politicking, Yeung says he is offering advice about how to succeed in the real, not the ideal, world. And he does not think that the public sector is any less dominated by office politics than the private.

“Public-sector organisations can actually be even more political,” says Yeung. “In the private sector there are clearer measures of performance. In the public sector, the lack of clarity in performance measures creates more tensions, and decisions are seen as political more often. I’ve found the public sector as much of a political minefield as the private.”

For those who do not recognise the world he describes, Yeung says “wake up and smell the coffee”. Bosses, he says, always have favourites, organisations do not care about employees and the only person with responsibility for your career is you, so put your own interests first.

Yeung says his book is a manual for dealing with reality. “I’m not saying that the rules of office politics are right or wrong,” he says. “I’m just saying that’s the way the world is. The political game doesn’t disappear just because you refuse to play it.

“I’m saying bitching, sniping and complaining about other people is not productive and that people should instead observe colleagues’ behaviour and do something about it.”

Isn’t it bleak, though, to suggest that the only way to get to the top is to accept the rules as they are and play by them? Without challenging the existing culture, how will workplaces ever change? And doesn’t acceptance of the existing rules allow organisations to escape their obligation to create fairer workplaces where what you know might come to matter more than who you know? In his book, Yeung admits to instances where he put his own career before principle. He talks of two former bosses — Alistair and Sean — and how he adapted to suit their “styles” even though those were objectionable. Alistair swore a lot and so when he was with him, Yeung would swear more too. Sean had a fixation with women’s breasts, so Yeung says a breast joke never went amiss when Sean was around. “The key to office politics is that people like people much like themselves,” says Yeung.

So how does Yeung personally square the reality of the workplace and his own career now? Interestingly, he chooses to work for himself.

“The reason I run my own business is because I no longer want to play the political game,” he says.

It seems ironic that the author who advocates the ambitious play by the rules rather than try to change them has himself walked away from the office..

ROB YEUNG’S TIPS FOR GETTING ON
  • Accept the reality and power of office politics.
  • Get to know the bigwigs and rising stars.
  • Don’t waste time on no-hopers and has-beens.
  • Cultivating influential people matters more than working hard.
  • Think strategically and understand the office undercurrents by becoming a confidant. Even when you are bored by colleagues’ stories, fake attentiveness.
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Dave is the perfect picture of the web's future

If you want to know why Google just bought the fledgling website YouTube for a cool £880m, ask David Cameron. His own cringe-inducing video blog, Webcameron, has had more than 2,500 YouTube views at last count — and it’s not even any good.

Dave’s vlog (yes, that’s the ghastly neologism we’ll all have to start deploying) was given its real headstart by a YouTube clip parodying it. The satire made news (it featured Sion Simon, a Labour MP, mimicking Cameron and offering to give away Dave’s wife and two — yes, only two — kids).

The news created a web buzz and the buzz ended up bringing the real thing to 10 times as many eyeballs. All in a few days. With no one on control. And everything in full view of anyone who cares what the Tory leader thinks as he loads a dishwasher to the sound of a bawling child.

Yes, Simon’s sense of propriety leaves something to be desired. But he, like Cameron, has the right idea. The web exists to empower great media corporations like, er, you. Or your strange nephew. Or your cranky uncle. Or that inspired French video artist, Michel Gondry. Or the best jokes from cable comedy, or the worst gaffes of politicians caught with their mouths open and their brains dead. Its riches are close to endless, its embarrassments compelling in the way only home video can be.

I stumbled across YouTube a year ago, and quickly became addicted. I became obsessed by a webcam clip of two young Asian students lip-syncing I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys. The deadpan facial expressions, the perfectly copied boy-band gestures, the passion for western pop culture, the off-camera Chinese slang: they all made for an almost poignant insight into globalisation.

But my favourite part was their room-mate. He sits behind them, his back to the camera, doing homework, and obviously bored and irritated by his inspired but demented fellows. Eventually, you see him get up and leave. He had no idea the back of his head would eventually be seen a quarter of a million times — on every continent. These amateurs almost have as much media power as the professionals.

So Google really isn’t that dumb. Where once the web was essentially a transmitter of words, it is fast becoming the newest incarnation of television — and YouTube has managed to occupy frontier territory. A year ago, to give a simple example, my own blog featured no videos at all. Now, I have a YouTube clip every day. The readers send them in, or I stumble across them in my meanderings across the web.

The variety is stunning. In the past couple of weeks I’ve featured the last five minutes of the HBO drama series Six Feet Under, a local news debate about a potential legalisation of cannabis in Nevada, a dramatic re-enactment of the waterboarding torture technique, and one of my favourite scenes from the 1980 comedy classic, Airplane!. It’s all there — if you want to find it.

YouTube yanks classic clips from the old media, adds a melange of amateur antics, scrambles recent television, and lets viewers decide what they prefer to watch and when they want to watch it.

Bloggers love it because it has a simple mechanism for embedding the YouTube clips onto your own blog, thereby bringing them to more people and making more, freely associative connections. By allowing itself to be embedded and multiplied across the blogosphere, YouTube grasped the essential fact of new media: let the consumers do the producing.

Here’s another example: two former colleagues of mine at the magazine The New Republic got bored with most political programming and simply constructed their own version of a television talk show. They debate with one another and sundry guests over video-cams, often to embarrassing or self-revealing effect.

It’s more viscerally interesting than a static column on newsprint; but more sophisticated than the average cable news show. They have no editors, but are gaining an audience. It is rather like the British 18DoughtyStreet internet political television show that the blogger Iain Dale launched last week. And if they want a vehicle to bring their wonkish debates to the masses, YouTube is only too happy to help.

Is this simple formula worth £880m? I have my doubts. Last week Google tried to reassure investors that it wasn’t on some acid trip back to the late 1990s. But YouTube feels a lot like the early Napster to me. It’s way too good to be true. Sometimes, ominously, a YouTube clip suddenly disappears — because someone somewhere wants their copyright back.

Big media companies are not too fond of having their content purloined, spliced and disseminated by amateurs for free — and the anarchy of the YouTube universe is not an easy fit with corporate world. Google’s chief understands this and said last week: “We are not in the content business and partnerships really show the application of our advertising network to the content and media abilities of our partners. We want those partners to put their media content into this emergent (system).”

Translated into English, I think that means Google has been striking deals with big media companies to get around some of the copyright problems, and share advertising revenue with content providers. If anyone tells you this will be easy, don’t believe them.

There’s one thing, however, that Cameron got right. He shrugged off the Simon parody as a lark, and seemed happy that it had increased the viewing of his original lame home-video 10-fold. That’s the attitude the web fosters; and it’s one reason why Google may not be so stupid in the long run.

The one thing many of us have in common is simply the desire to express ourselves or to communicate our tastes and enthusiasms to others. It’s called self-expression. The web has unleashed it for millions who never believed they would ever have a moment in the spotlight.

The only possible response is to sit back and watch — or to create your own television channel. All you need is a boy-band soundtrack or a couple of dirty forks and a dishwasher. Mr Cameron, get ready for your close-up. Your 15 seconds of vlogger-fame are formally here.

Andrew Sullivan (ST)
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