Bytes · YouTube sorted - Online thermal surveys - You're Ian Huntley

• Very neat. Great, clear interface too.

  What is Middio?
  Launched in mid-2007, Middio makes an effort of properly tagging the most popular music videos uploaded by members to YouTube.com. Although the music videos are hosted by YouTube.com, they can be searched for and watched on Middio without ads.
  

  
  
• Google posts about new policy about why [we] remember information about [you]
  
  
• New US Army YouTube Channel.
  
  
• Futureboy reports that:
  

  A British company called Hotmapping has been doing thermal surveys of local districts using spy planes. The results are being posted on the web by district councils, with the upshot being that you can now see which houses are leaking heat. Blue houses are cool; red houses are taking their energy dollars (or pounds, in this case), and spewing them into the atmosphere ...
  

  And if they are not aboard the lower emissions bandwagon? Then they will be shamed in front of the whole neighborhood as energy hogs. Green action groups will know which doors to knock on. Insulation companies will know where to send their direct mail.

  Naturally, there are the inevitable privacy concerns. And it's disturbing to learn that for Haringey Council alone, it took 17 flights on the spy plane to get all this information. That's a lot of carbon emissions right there.
  
  
  

• Interesting point in this video-article about the size of the online porn industry:
  

  Usually the porn industry innovates first and key features make their way to more mainstream sites. But over the last couple of years, many of the new ideas around web applications, like user generated content, video sharing, etc., went mainstream first and are now hitting the porn sites.
  
  

• William Heath reports to Ideal Government his bad experience with DirectGov (link added for o/s readers..):
  

  Do you know what’s a complete drag - far from ideal in fact? I KNEW before i did the search that the results would be absurd. I even started this article confident that DirectGov would throw up nonsense against this important search term. Privacy-enhancing technologies are the key to trust in e-government. NGOs have been saying it for a decade. The PM’s policy unit under Geoff Mulgan twigged, but it was all soon forgotten. Now we just build systems that assume everyone is a terrorist of paedophile. (You think I’m joking? A key government CIO responded to my concerns about data sharing by jabbing a pointy finger at my ribs and saying “You’re Ian Huntley, right? You’re Ian Huntley.” No Mr CIO. I’m NOT Ian Huntley. Nooo Noooo No. None of us are, except Ian Huntley, and he’s dead.)

  Anyway, the final depressing thought is that the only announcement I recall our e-government Minister making is that every web site other than DirectGov is to close down. It’s not that I’ll miss the others, it’s just I find DirectGov so dispiriting, with its pointey logo and smug editorialising. I just never go there, except to do the sort of comedy search I did tonight.