Well, YouTube is still "processing" after about another 45 minutes. I tried out VideoEgg as well and got better results. The catch is that you've got to install their proprietary video upload application, which was painless enough. They don't support FireFox on MacOS, so I had to dust off Safari. After jumping those minor hurdles it was about 1 minute to upload the video - huge difference.

Here's the result via VideoEgg:

So I actually have some thoughts queued up to write. At the moment though I'm experimenting with video. It just took me about 40+ minutes to upload a 36 second clip of Stella to YouTube. Let's see how it looks.

Update: Now you can see the video below. Took about 3 hours to get it on to YouTube with about two thirds of the time processing after upload. The display size is bigger than it needs to be and at the cost of overall quality. Also as you watch this you'll notice how out of sync the video/audio are - note how my commands come after Stella does each trick. $1.6BB? WTF? Shows you the value of users, brand and hype.

Last week I was saddened to find out that the RIAA had once again massively puppeteered the US government, this time by having them negotiated with Russia to shut down AllofMP3.com. I have been using the site for the past several months and it's fantastic.

Anyway, today I was somewhat encouraged to learn that this latest effort may not have had as much power behind it as we originally expected. TechSpot and a few other news sources are reporting that AllofMP3 may be hanging on after all. I continue to root for the underdog.

An ad appearing on IGN caught my eye yesterday. Apparently UNC-Greensboro is offering a microeconomics course that is taught via an online game. According to the Econ 201 site "Course content is presented through problem-solving tasks that are part of the overarching game narrative."

I would imagine the game is pretty crappy and probably not truly multiplayer. But it's still very interesting to see online gaming applied at the college course level.

If you were not from Texas and took a look at this site right here: http://www.texas.gov/...

...would y'all have any clue that there is a gubernatorial election happening? If you ran that site, would you maybe provide some link or acknowledgement that election day is next week? Maybe? Just a little one perhaps?

Interesting position piece on Apple in BusinessWeek today:

Apple, Tear Down This Wall

One sentence caught my eye: "IPod sales still account for 40% or so of Apple's revenue, and let's face it, the iTunes Store exists to sell iPods."

I wasn't sure about that one - seems in some ways like iPods exist to sell iTunes. So I took a look at iPod sales compared to iTunes (listed as "Other Products/Services" in Apple's SEC filings. In 2005, revenue in the iTunes category was about 1/5 of iPod revenue. But this year, it looks more like 1/4. As the MP3 player market matures, seems like we should expect music sales to become more of the reason to get players into the market. MP3s also have fantastic margins, no inventory, no logistics, etc. I dare say you might see certain brands (probably not Apple) dropping device prices to the floor.

It wouldn't be the first time we've seen this strategy, with Microsoft losing big bucks on XBOX360 in support of more profitable game sales.

What do you think?

Got this text from YouTube's About Us page: "Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube, Inc. on February 14, 2005. Jawed Karim left the company to pursue an advanced degree at Stanford."

If Karim wasn't so impatient he probably could have bought Stanford. Oh well.

It's official.