Redstate

It was flagged as objectionable and inaccessible without a login (if you even wanted to access it at that point... most would think it was pornography)... I can confirm that much myself... and at the time it was the only version up there. They have since unflagged it and apparently others have uploaded additional copies. Malkin is still banned. I find it to be unbelievable that a business like this would engage in that kind of activity. It is just really bad business. Hopefully it ends now that they are part of a publicly traded company. This would certainly be a violation of their fiduciary duty to their shareholders otherwise.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

Those guys at YouTube are multi-millionaires this week, and you are telling them they don't know how to run a business? How exactly did it hurt their busness? Thats pretty funny.

As for Malkin getting banned, its a private website. Redstate can limit its users. So can YouTube.

If you are a private company you can do whatever you want. Once you are a public company, your responsibilities are to maximize results for your shareholders. You can still make a lot of money while making boneheaded decisions... besides, I seriously doubt this direction is coming from the top.

As far as the multi-millionaires can do no wrong thesis, that is just ridiculous. There are a lot of multi-millionaires at the helm of companies in bankruptcy protection, but hey, I guess they were doing everything right.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

And I do not even have a YouTube account.

Do you really think everybody is just making this up? I saw it for myself. It happened within 24 hours of being put on the site.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

It was objectionble when Michelle Malkin loaded it and got her banned, but when an unedited version was loaded by someone else, it was all right...
...how unbelievably Democratic of them...

"Always be honest with yourself even if you are honest with no one else...
...It helps you keep track of your lies..."
--Myself

The post attempts to see the forest.

Develop alternatives to existing policies and keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. Milton Friedman

"The Road To Freedom Is Seldom Traveled By The Multitude" Madhouse Thought

The zucker ad, which did get flagged though not pulled, is not the video that the article is referring to. Malkin had a video done about Jihadist initimidation tactics. That is the one that YouTube has censored and deletes on-site.

Conservative Compendium

People would need to create an account to view it, which many (most?) people would not bother to do. Even if it didn't require the creation of an account, many people would not choose to view it simply because of the warning that it is obscene or indecent. It seems, according to the news reports, that a YouTube employee had to get involved to restrict access to 18 and older.
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"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson

It certainly wasn't my intent to imply that falsely flagging videos as inapporpriate simply because someone disagrees with the point of view is appropriate behavoir. I just wanted to make sure the other replyer knew which video the article was talking about.

Conservative Compendium

Unless we have clairvoyant lawyers in the house,there's no way anyone could determine whether the posting of the Harry Reid bit was a copyright violation. We'd have to know who made the video, who posted it, and whether there was any license given.

"Every time some nitwit college student burns a flag on camera, that's one less idiot who can ever run for public office." - Crank

In the physical world, if you want to run a business, you can get a building, set up shop, and you have visibility to all passersby, and can probably get a nice writeup in the newspaper when you open. The Internet isn't like that; also-ran competitors tend to get plowed under. That's what the appeal of these broad-based sites are; they attract an inhuman amount of traffic, and, if you're attempting to get information spread, that's the way to go. Starting a "conservative video" site, while potentially useful for "the base", only goes so far.

To put it in words that our left-leaning friends would understand, what ever happened to the concept of civic responsibility in business? Nobody's expecting YouTube to support conservative speech (which isn't likely, as the computer industry was initially driven quite a bit by former hippies, and that mentality seems to still be at play), but at least having the same ability to have access to the forum as 9/11 conspiracy theorists, avowed Marxists, and anti-establishment, anti-capitalist anarchists would be nice. They currently aren't even affording our side that much. However, with Google buying them out, don't expect this to get any better. If anything, it may get even worse.

"I could explain, but that would be very long, very convoluted, and make you look very stupid. Nobody wants that... except maybe me."

For most of the reasons I already cited, but I'll elaborate using the brick and mortar alternative. I can register a domain name, secure a host, develop some kind of site or application or online service, and potentially be up and running, live for the world to see, within days or weeks depending on the level of effort my idea requires to implement. I can do all of this without waiting for a license, securing local permits, checking with zoning regulations. It is, almost entirely, within my own control and will move at the pace I set based on how hard I work - not by how slow and inefficient other people, particularly government offices, work.

It's great that I can go through all the beaurocracy and finally open my brick and mortar, and be rewarded with a newspaper writeup. But c'mon, the RedState owners surely could have done the same thing: "Local Man Makes Website, Gets National Audience". Wait, not just national, worldwide!

When we see an argument that raises fear over how no one else will ever be able to unseat a popular website, and which ignores the fact that the website in question had zero popularity as opposed to it's own competition 18 months ago, it just falls apart. You can compete easier against Internet companies than against any other well established brick and mortar corporation. Claiming otherwise just strikes me as whining.

Starting a "conservative video" site, while potentially useful for "the base", only goes so far.

The issue I take with this kind of viewpoint is twofold. One, it incorrectly defines the "pie", so to speak, as being much smaller than it really is. Recent election results suggest that there are more people in America who vote Republican than Democrat. Should R's lose a few seats next month, the worst you can probably say is that maybe the voting public at large has tilted from roughly 51/49 R over D to roughly 51/49 D over R. You still have about the same level of audience out there as your opposition, so why should a conservative video site "only go so far"? Two, and related, this continues to ignore the huge commercial success of Fox News and talk radio personalities like Limbaugh. At the time they started, they were able to fill a niche and then grow it out to capture a majority audience. They did this in the face of already established competition.

Isn't saying that you need a site like YouTube to be more "fair" equivalent to saying you need a network like CNN to be more "fair"? When the reality is you should stop worrying about how YouTube manages itself and go find or create your own Fox News.

To the extent the OP's posting has a noble aim at heart, I have no problem. The the degree with which it attepts to raise the clarion call by mischaracterizing the incredible free market opportunity, and yes, the inherent democracy in capitalism that is taking place as consumers - the American public - determines on their own what sites to browse, I think it treads dangerously close to socialist dogma and sounds rather elitist: the people aren't smart enough to figure it out on their own, and they're being hornswoggled, and if we don't do something the sky will fall.

I don't think this is true, but the answer is simple enough for those who want to capture mindshare from their competition: COMPETE.

Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and the newest anti-corporatist boogeyman, Google: The Svengali Trio. Quick, let's break them up, restrict them, regulate them, fine them, and penalize them before they enslave us all!

This diary specifically ruled out such regulations. Did you read it?
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.

My opening was a general rant against all such "xyz corporation is bad and must be stopped" stuff. I did read the posting, which is why I congratulated the author thusly:

I am glad you stop short of actually calling for some misguided "fairness" garbage ...

Did you read mine?

I save myself a lot of headaches and time on RS by often stopping reading when I hit warning signs like that part I quoted. So no, I saw that quote, looked at the block of text below, and moved on, deciding after that quote it wasn't going to be worth reading.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.

You waited to move on just long enough to leave the snarky response! No worries, I'm sure I do the same thing from time to time...

not that these sites need to be regulated or destroyed. It's that conservatives are consistently behind the 8-ball in the blogosphere and the internet. Conservatives need to take a hand in developing these technologies, to ensure they aren't used in this way. Because once a technology is invented, it is hard to come up with a competing one.

I like RedState a lot, but it gets a fraction of the traffic of DailyKos, in part because it was launched about two years later. Kos, bless his lunatic heart, had a great idea with DKosPedia, a wiki entry that gives a leftwing take on politics that other sites link to, creating a massive left-wing google bomg. For a long time, no one had sought protection for George Allen's website, and it was filled with unrebutted charges about his campaign. Conrad Burns's wiki entry is still a giant hit piece. And if you google "Conrad Burns," you get googleads to "Defeat Conrad Burns" and "Conrad Burns's Record."

This is a problem. We are continually behind the 8-ball in the internet. This needs to change.

http://www.myelectionanalysis.com

What makes you think it's the internet left that keeps those 'googlebombs' active?

Google has simply stopped working on improving their search service. It's not to the credit of the left's work that these attacks work; it's to the shame of Google that they've stopped FIXING THE ENGINE once these attacks have proven effective.

Use better search services. Google's been trash for some time now.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.

There is no such thing yet.
I have tried 3 or 4 other search engines and no of them can compete.

ask.com works better for me than Google for all but highly technical computer-related subjects.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.

"The Babel fish could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D." - HHG2TG

That's not really the point. The point is, Lefties figured out a gap in the system, and set up a device that takes advantage of it. We didn't (and still haven't). Your last comment about finding a better search engine is exactly the point, though. With the way things are going in the blogosphere, that new search engine will be developed by Lefties, and have the same problems. It's something we on the right need to get much better at (probably complicated by the fact that most of us have real jobs, but whatever).

http://www.myelectionanalysis.com

If a Google search for Conrad Burns returns Adwords links to sites hostile to Conrad Burns, that simply means the Tester people paid more for their rankings then Burn's people, assuming the latter camp was even savvy enough to do this.

Google searches are driven by mathmatical algorithms. Per googlebombing it can be abused, but it can be abused by anybody, not just idiot liberal college kids with too much time on their hands.

So to sum it up, the political views of Google employees are in no position to trickle down to how the service performs one way or the other. The top brass at Google are pretty liberal, but they're far more passionate about their technology then their politics, and aren't going to risk their fortunes on tampering with search results just to giggle at Bush's name coming up when somebody types "failure", etc.

I know some people in the "Web 2.0" social networking business, and without exception they are (a) very clever and (b) range politically from moderately left to screaming moonbat. As an example of the sorts of innovations these men and women produce, I have an acquaintance of the "screaming moonbat" variety who is developing on a "truth-detection" website where the facts and arguments for and against a specific proposition (e.g. "the U.S. used illegal chemical munitions in the battle of Falluja") can be put head-to-head against one another. Arguments can be related to one another through links (e.g. "this argument contradicts that one," "this piece of data supports this argument," etc.) and evaluated by users as being convincing, relevant, and so forth. Mathematical algorithms take all of this information and produce a combined rating for relevance and credibility for each argument in favor of or against a specific proposition. Users and data sources (such as websites) also acquire credibility ratings based on their tendency to make or support credible arguments, which in turn depends upon the ratings of other users. This creates an all-important social link between the users of the site and encourages the participation of those with high credibility scores.

This site probably won't be successful as a "truth detector," since given its founder, most of its users are likely to come from the left-o-sphere and "truth" does not necessarily correlate with what individual people find credible or convincing. For example, until a few years ago, no one with any expertise would have found the statement "most stomach ulcers are caused by an infection" to be credible, even though such a statement would have been true. However, the more I think about it, the site may very well evolve into a focal point where those on the left side of the political sphere can gather together, break down the arguments for and against their point-of-view, and work together to compile evidence that supports their beliefs and refutes the beliefs of their opponents in a structured manner. Furthermore, they will able able to leverage the heretofore silent part of their community to identify the most convincing and credible arguments. Their strongest arguments can then be propagated throughout the blogosphere while right-wing bloggers, working individually and without being able to leverage the silent parts of their own community. Although they may never be able to convince hard-core conservatives of their point-of-view, network effects may draw in large numbers of moderates or formerly apolitical types and convince them of the "truth" of the left-wing point of view.

This particular fellow is not some stary-eyed college kid, but a self-made millionaire with the time, talent and resources to pull this off. The devil is, of course, in the details as to whether his site will be a success or not, but there are many more bright and talented individuals of the left-wing persuasion working on projects like this one and some of them are bound to succeed. We on the right need to get our act together and find innovative ways to link our communities together and leverage our own knowledge and talent to argue our own point-of-view in ways that go beyond just blogs, diaries and talk radio. Through neglect and disdain, we've already lost academia and with it, the media and the primary and secondary education systems and we cannot afford to lose political and ideological discussion on the Internet in the same way.

YouTube and Wikipedia are alot alike. Both provide popular and valuable services. Both do it with few employees and rely on the rest of the world for all the great content. A real life example would resemble trying to control Iraq with just a thousand soldiers. Until the AI is developed to stop GNAA-like political activists from going in and whizzing all over the furniture, you will just have to deal with any political content being unreliable.

It's not service providers fault that polical activists can't play nice. Rather it's a sign of just how sad politics in America have come.

"The Babel fish could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D." - HHG2TG

In an era where content is created collectively by a wide range of individuals rather than a small group, our point-of-view will only be represented inasmuch as we choose to defend it in these new public arenas. When it comes to controversial subjects, Wikipedia's much-vaunted "neutral point-of-view" can only be achieved it both sides contribute to the subject and defend their work. The inevitable reversion wars and locked that will occur will either converge to an article that is truly neutral (not likely if activists on both sides are being paid to make sure content reflects their side's version of things), force Wikipedia to adopt a solution that leads to better articles, or force them to drop controversial subjects from the encyclopedia altogether.

Who is interested in defending or compromising their position? There already is plenty of both sides mucking up wikipedia. Even if you could find level-headed people from each side to put together an accurate and factual article, it will still be vandalized if the topic is hot enough. The best policy is for time to reslove it. You don't stop dropping anything anyone finds controversial. Informative and helpful entries like this or this would both be gone. The problem doesn't lie with Wikipedia or similar service providers, it lies with activists.

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." - HHG2TG

I agree with you that the activists are a problem. However, in a world where anyone can edit an article, they are a feature of the ideological landscape that has to be dealt with. If the right abandons Wikipedia, or is slow to catch on to its potential, then the controversial articles will naturally reflect a left-wing point-of-view because those are the people willing to spend the time editing the articles to reflect that point-of-view. It doesn't matter if this is fair or not, any more that it matters if what the insurgents in Iraq fighting fair. The activists exist, and they have to be dealt with. The right needs to defend its turf and spend some time shaping the ideological battlefield on the Internet.

In the latter part of my previous comment, I meant to say that prolonged conflict between left and right over controversial articles is an unstable situation that will evolve towards a solution over time. That solution may take several forms, including:

1. The constant reversion wars, page locking, and
   disclaimers so annoy the users of Wikipedia that
   it drives them away, causing Wikipedia to fail. This
   would be very bad (and very unlikely), but it could
   happen, and as I said, activists and people with an
   irrational attachment to their own narrow POV and
   a lot of time on their hands to defend it are a feature
   of the Wikipedia landscape that has to be dealt with,
   fair or not.

2. The owners of Wikipedia decide they don't want to
   deal with the constant battles and decide to drop
   controversial subjects from Wikipedia. Again, this
   would be bad, and isn't likely to happen either,
   but it is a possible end-state.

3. The activists, owners of Wikipedia, and its general
   users evolve a set of rules and enforcement mechanisms,
   both formal and informal, that allow all sides of an
   issue to represent their views more-or-less equally,
   leading to informative articles with a true "neutral
   point-of-view."

4. Wikipedia experiences a general decline in its
   credibility where controversial articles are
   concerned, as its users come to realize that these
   articles reflect the point-of-view of whomever
   has the biggest axe to grind, but continues to
   survive as a basic reserch tool.

These are by no means the only things that could happen, but once the right acquires its own activists to match the left, a solution will have to emerge sooner or later. On the other hand, if the right abandons the battlefield (as seems to be the inclination of some) simply because it is messy or bothersome, then it will have ceded a valuable piece of ideological turf to the left that it will come to regret.