“Apply for revenue sharing for your video the zorb rolls down a hill”

But surprisingly enough, it appears to be the real deal, based on a video shot of me a few years ago riding the Zorb down a hillside in New Zealand (it’s great fun, trust me!).

I’ll try it out and see if I earn more than 30 cents off the revenue share, and keep our readers posted. For the rest of our Internet brethren, I thought you’d find it interesting that YouTube is conitnuing to expand their revenue sharing program, even to videos like mine with a mere 32,745 views.

The payment program itself looks pretty straightforward — they’ve tied the payments into AdSense, and there’s a brief tutorial of rules (with a fair number of DO NOT items called out in bold, red text) about what’s allowable. The impression I gathered is that YouTube is extremely sensitive to monetizing any copyrighted content, even mashups or any slightly derivative works of copyrighted content.

It looks like this is part of a recent move by YouTube to expand their revenue sharing program for specific videos, I’ve noticed posts from HyveUp and other blogs also receiving these invitations for relatively medium-to-low traffic individual videos.

Now if only Flickr would launch their *own* revenue sharing program, instead of making me pay them for the privilege of hosting!

Here’s the text of the email I received:

Dear downtempo,

Your video the zorb rolls down a hill has become popular on YouTube, and you’re eligible to apply for the YouTube Partnership Program, which allows you to make money from playbacks of your video.

Once you’re approved, making money from your video is easy. Here’s how it works: First sign into your YouTube account. Then, complete the steps outlined here: [URL DELETED]. Once you’re finished, we’ll start placing ads next to your video and pay you a share of the revenue as long as you meet the program requirements.

We look forward to adding your video to the YouTube Partnership Program. Thanks and good luck!

The YouTube Team

Downtempo’s Dallas office is located at:

Cohabitat
2517 Thomas Ave
Dallas TX, 75248
(the door sticks, so don’t be afraid to push)

Breakfast Tacos will be served from 8am-10am, while we rock our fine Downtempo beats.

CONNECT with new people and find out about what they are up to!

PARTICIPATE in riveting discussions about technology, startups, and obscure epicurean delights!

ENJOY the spicy delights of the Downtempo Hot Sauce Bar!

And for those of you who would be so kind to register beforehand (someone has to figure out how many supplies to get!), we’ve setup a Facebook event to collect RSVPs.

See you at breakfast!

unresponsive, yet funny, chrome error message, originally uploaded by downtempo.

It seems that http://microsoft.com refuses to load on the current Mac build of Google Chrome, leaving me with this dialog chestnut. Thought I’d share with the Downtempo audience on this sunny San Francisco saturday!

When looking at what makes a great web application, I like to look at offline models that are successful and haven’t yet been replicated online. Simply creating the online equivalent lets you leverage a proven model and increases your chance of success at the start.

For example, when I was at Burning Man in 1997 and 1998, I spent some time DJing on the radio station near Center Camp created by Moebius, Frequency Publica (“Radio by the people, for the people”). Despite the fact that I hadn’t DJ’ed since college, I had a bunch of CDs I’d borrowed from a friend and hadn’t listened to before, and the mixer didn’t have a headphone cue feature, I became a microcelebrity for an hour.

Thanks to the powerful antenna reaching across the playa at 91.5 FM, and the loudspeakers pointing into Center Camp, what started as random passers-by became a crowd dancing around the loudspeakers and multiple radio listeners across the playa. Once the first people started coming over to thank me for the music, I was hooked.

When I came home from the playa, I missed the experience and thought about how I’d love to bring that back into the Real World. I thought about college radio, but it didn’t have the interactivity and broad reach that I missed from Frequency Publica. I also wanted to pull in my friends in Seattle who were electronic musicians (Rock on, Glitchpop), so it had to be able to reach at least between San Francisco and Seattle.

At the same time in 1999, Justin Frankel had just released Shoutcast, which let anyone create their own radio station. Perfect timing. So I setup a Shoutcast server on my home DSL line (back when DSL was brand-new, and having 384k of bandwidth at home was cutting-edge), gathered together my friends, and made an agreement to rotate the server each evening to a different broadcaster, creating a rotating community around a single server.

The next step was to scale up the idea to something much larger — Frequency Publica could only have one broadcaster at a time, but the Internet didn’t have those kinds of limitations. I just needed a lot of bandwidth… the kind that my employer, Nanocosm Technologies, had at their server colocation facilities.

So I brought the idea to our CTO at the time, Peter Rothman, and we put together a new plan for the company that combined free streaming radio server hosting with 365mb of web hosting, and 3D homepages, which we called “Live365″. (The radio server popularity soon outstripped the web hosting and 3D homepages, and those features were dropped from the product offering.)

Once we launched, the numbers on the radio project exploded beyond anyone’s expectations (even my lofty ones!), and Live365 rapidly became the world’s second largest broadcaster soon after beginning operations. All we really did was take “Radio by the people, for the people”, put it online, scale it up, and paid attention to building a strong grassroots community one broadcaster at a time. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones you come up with at a great party in the desert.

Today’s 4-pack of cupcakes (one was a gift to our co-workers, one for me, one for my colleague Amanada from Zoo II, and one for Thursday) was a deliciously foodie mix of drizzled honey, fresh triple-chocolate, and chai tea. Delicious!

And for our clients, we definitely recommend scheduling your meetings at our offices on Wednesdays to take full advantage of our ability to retrieve the best cupcakes in San Francisco within 20 steps of our doorway.

One of our early projects that we’ve been proud to work on was the redesign of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope website, and we’ve just learned that the beta version of their new website has launched!

We worked with Seso in Los Angeles to provide product strategy and management in the early ideation and design phases of the website, and are glad to see that the new website is now live! We’re looking forward to seeing how the Spitzer team uses their new social communication and media curation tools to share their mission and content more effectively with the public.

If you’re interested in seeing the before-and-after comparison, don’t forget to take a look at the Spitzer website before the redesign and after the redesign.

After emerging from a most delicious breakfast (at neighborhood fav Cindy’s Delicatessen — lox and eggs, yum!), I discovered my iPhone laying forlorn on the pavement outside my vehicle. The ringer was functional, but the screen was scrambled. Thankfully, the screen was not cracked.

My next stop was, of course, the friendly neighborhood Apple store. There I had a staggeringly good customer service experience. Staggeringly.

So to get to the point, they replaced my phone expeditiously (I think I was in and out in 20 minutes) and at no cost to me (hurrah!). But the thing that I wanted to note on the blog, was that the “free” part of my blissful replacement experience appeared to hinge on the dreaded visual inspection. Not one, but TWO Apple store employees looked over my poor phone with a fine toothed comb, and deemed me worthy of a replacement. But apparently too many scratches and dings to the plastic will void the warranty. And iPhones are not cheap to replace.

It was not clear to me what level of scratchitude would lead to future heartache (that remains a closely guarded secret of the nefarious genius bar), but I plan on being very conservative in the future.

Be gentle with your electronics people! And if you carry an iPhone, always wear protection.

I have a nerd crush on Japan’s 61mbps for $16.50/month. Sign me up!

This photo makes it look like there is a glass ball growing out of the top of my head.  I swear this is not the case!

And look! It’s good friend and noted Downtempo blog commenter Chris McCall. Perhaps that banana is just a prop in yet another gripping discussion of subtitling engines.

Suprisingly, the Soyrizo was a big hit! 

I guess you never know when a vegan dish might become a crowd pleaser.

Of course, we wouldn’t be at CoHabitat, if there wasn’t some one somewhere working diligently.

Hey Ross – is that work?  Or is it Facebook?

I can’t seem to shake this can of Bacon flavored SPAM!

Thanks to all of our friends at CoHabitat for making this a great event!

They recently added Personalized Ranking, which sorts feed folders according to which articles Google thinks I will like the most.

I have a few folders in my GReader that are completely out of control.  This sample folder, where I track mainstream print media news, tends to fill up with a bunch of junk I don’t want to read.  I spend more time scanning article titles than I actually spend reading body text.

I would love to read the most interesting 1% of these articles each day, but it can be taxing to find the diamond in the rough.

Now, with Personalized Rankings, I enable the humorously named “Sort by Magic” feature, a Google guesses which articles I will like the best.  I’ve experimented with it a bit, and it seems to work reasonably well.

The feature works based on your history of Likes and Sharing.  Unsettlingly, it also uses the nefarious Google Web History to rank feeds and articles based on my search history.  This thought gives me the heebie jeebies, but Personalized Rankings is the first feature utilizing Web History that just might win me over.

Would you trade privacy for getting back some lost time?