Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Jimmy Wales, the founder of the popular Wikipedia, is now planning to barge into the terrain of search engines. He told a conference of software developers the other day that his company Wikia Inc was planning to launch a community based search service. Wikia has acquired web crawler Grub to power the search service. But the real power will rest on millions of anonymous users, who will use their spare time to index and collate searches. Like Wikipedia, the search service will depend on humans and not on algorithms which are used by Google and other popular search engines. "We (will) collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box," said Wales. He added that the new service may change the balance of power in the search terrain. We can take him at his word. YouTube to clean up The free for all in YouTube may soon come to end. The popular website has decided to introduce recognition technology from September ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Inc.'s widely anticipated music- and video-playing iPhone will allow subscribers to wirelessly stream material from Google Inc.'s popular video-sharing site YouTube, Apple said on Wednesday. YouTube, which has developed a huge audience on desktop computers but is not widely used on cell phones, has begun encoding its videos in a new format to improve quality and save battery life when viewed over wireless devices. The iPhone will be the first mobile device to use the new format, Apple said. More than 10,000 videos will be available on the iPhone when it hits stores on June 29, with more material added each week, it said. AT&T Inc. has an exclusive deal to sell iPhones with its wireless subscriptions. While the phone will not support AT&T's highest-speed cellular data links, Apple said YouTube would work well on the phone's short-range Wi-Fi network connection. Prior to the development of the new mobile format, Verizon Wireless, a ve...

When the video-sharing site YouTube.com was sold to Google, many of its users worried that corporate ownership would restrict the con tent of its videos. But now one of YouTube’s partners is changing the ways that users comment on those videos. YouTube, which is host to many official CBS video clips under an October licensing agreement with the network, has changed its layout for some of the Web pages with CBS videos. Most YouTube videos are embedded on Web pages that allow viewers to read user comments, with some of them listed directly below the video. These comments can range from the coherent (“That was hilarious.”) to the, er, less-so (“omg lol!”) to the profane. The comments on many of the videos posted by CBS have now been moved to a separate page; instead of sample comments underneath the videos, a link to “view all comments” takes users to a separate Web page where they can read comments. CBS began moving and filtering comments on some videos shortly after announcing its lice...

Glenn Chapman, San Francisco: Google is in behind-the-scenes talks with film and music studios trying to make newly acquired video-sharing website YouTube a gold mine, and not a lawsuit-generating black hole. While some analysts questioned the sanity of Google buying YouTube in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal, Internet insiders contend that Google is shrewdly manoeuvring on solid ground. “The Internet offers real opportunities for media companies to reach a wider, global audience and to interact more directly with users,” Google said. On the day the online search powerhouse bought superstar start-up YouTube it also announced deals with CBS, Sony, BMG, Vivendi Universal Music and Warner Group to feature their videos on the Internet. A number of studios have contacted Google to explore ways to cash-in on their shows, films or songs becoming Internet sensations. Google can shield itself from lawsuits by taking down copyrighted videos after the owners complain, according to attorney Jason...