Ryan Milner, age 22, was stabbed in the chest in Ontario, Canada, at a parking lot after a hiphop concert at a nightclub with some bloke called Sean Price. Milner died shortly after. So where does Youtube fit in?

A George Gallow, age 24, turned him self in and has been charged with second degree murder. The reason? Media buzz and the fact that he’s on a now removed Youtube video, wearing a baseball cap with the word “Joker”. Obviously a bit too easy to identify and tie to the scene of the crime, since Gallow decided to give up and just step back.

“This is the first time Hamilton police have utilized video Web posting in an investigation, and to the best of its knowledge, the first time that law enforcement has ever used it as a direct investigative tool,” Staff Sgt. Jorge Lasso told a news conference.

Source: News.com

Originally posted on December 21, 2006 @ 3:37 pm

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Originally posted on December 26, 2006 @ 5:09 am

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication is a method to syndicate your site’s content. Microsoft has applied for two patents, (here and here) that cover the ability to ‘subscribe to a particular Web feed’ and ‘efficiently consume or read RSS feeds using both an RSS reader and a Web browser.’

Now this would be okay if Microsoft had invented the readers, but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t!

Word of Microsoft’s applications drew fire from Dave Winer, a self-described co-inventor of RSS. “Presumably they’re eventually going to charge us to use it,” he wrote in Thursday morning’s dispatch at his site, Scripting News. “This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS.”

CNET has more.

Originally posted on December 22, 2006 @ 10:40 pm

Om Malik over at GigaOM gives us a little peak inside The Venice Project, the latest from Skype and Kazaa creators Janus Friis and Niklas Sennström. The idea is to use broadband to stream TV using peer-to-peer technology.

I had heard from a lot of people who were lukewarm on the offering and were not impressed by the photo quality. I am not sure what happened, but those problems have been fixed. The visuals on a Lenovo T60 with a 15.2-inch screen were stunning and crisp. The streams came through without a problem and there was very little jitter. Still, no point hooking it up to a big screen TV… just yet! There isn’t LIVE TV content on the service right now and most of what is there consists of meager offerings streaming off the Venice Project servers. So you can’t truly judge how good this service will be when it comes to “live” broadcasts just yet.

Head over to GigaOM for more, and screenshots.

Originally posted on December 21, 2006 @ 2:37 pm

Great news for all of you (and me) who use Amazon Associates! They’re doing monthly payments instead of quarterly starting January 2007.

Beginning January 1, 2007, standard Amazon Associates payments will be monthly instead of quarterly, paid approximately 60 days after the end of each month. For example, referral fees earned in January will be paid at the end of March, and payment of referral fees earned in February will be paid at the end of April.

60 days is perhaps a bit much if you ask me, but sure, they’ll want to collect the money you make them before actually paying you.

Originally posted on December 21, 2006 @ 2:54 am