From TechCrunch:

In their largest acquisition to date, Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in an all stock transaction. Both companies have approved the deal, which should officially close in the fourth quarter. YouTube’s 65 employees will remain with the company at YouTube’s San Bruno headquarters.

I don’t understand spending well over a billion dollars for something that is positioned to get hammered in copyright-violation-related lawsuits, uses technologies that you, by and large, already have, and probably loses money. But, clearly I’m a simpleton.

Q: What percentage of MySpace users are over 35 years old?
A: According to a report from comscore, more than 50%.

(found on Om’s blog)

It’s encouraging to see that perhaps the demographic for people who understand/use social networks is broader than many people think.

Last year I had to make a table of how the various screen resolutions map to their cryptic acronyms, because I couldn’t find a nice consolidated list.

I just stumbled upon this sweet graphic at wikipedia which does a good job of showing them all. The red line represents 4:3 formats, and the purple line is for 16:9 (widescreen) formats.

For reference, QVGA is what your iPod can display, XGA is probably what your computer is running, WUXGA is what my computers run, and WQXGA sounds like heaven. Well, maybe unreadably-tiny hell if your screen is 15″, but heaven if it’s 30″ Apple Cinema Display.

ArsTechnica covers an Accenture study which reported:

The results found that nearly half (47 percent) of those surveyed in the US want to be able to download movies, TV shows, and other video content to their television sets, with even more of those surveyed globally (54 percent) wishing for such technology.

This starts to support some of the theories that Paul Graham espoused in his essay The Power of the Marginal:

The big media companies shouldn’t worry that people will post their copyrighted material on YouTube. They should worry that people will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that instead.

If we get to a point where people can rouinely get video-based content via the web on their TV, that starts to put network programming and user-generated content on a more even playing field. They will have to compete for user’s attention on the big(ger) screen.

I came across this word when reading about pipelining at mozilla.org. They used it casually, as if everyone knows what it means. I looked it up and it’s actually a useful word, at least in the context of computer science.

In computing, idempotence is the quality of something that has the same effect if used multiple times as it does if used only once…

There are a lot of times where knowing whether or not a function is idempotent would be handy, especially with stuff like character-escaping.

Dare had an interesting post about how the COO of News Corp (parent company of MySpace) came out and said some disturbing things about MySpace’s role in the internet ecosystem.

From COO Peter Chernin:

“If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket…almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace, there’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business.”

Pete Cashmore correctly points out that Flickr probably had little success on the back of MySpace. I’d also add that digg, del.icio.us, writely, gmail, google maps and the vast majority of Web 2.0 sites are not driven off the back of MySpace – so Chernin is making a huge overstatement. Admittedly though, Photobucket and YouTube are good examples of businesses MySpace could probably kill (or substantially wound) if they wanted to.

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An interesting (and short) article over at arstechnica takes a look at that question. If a website ranks highly in searches, and search rankings are based on popularity, won’t that only serve to make the website more popular and keep it high on the list? This study suggests, counter-intuitively, that the opposite is true.