By Dave Riley
I bet you thought that I was being a touch sadistic to impose upon your bandwidth the writings of Walter Benjamin (here and here). Dense are they not?
So we'll put Benjamin aside for the moment (I'll say three Hail Marys) and come to the main problem. Unfortunately the excellent video aggregator I've been using here as well as every else where , Vodpod, has done what all web start ups aspire to do, and is now trying turn a profit.
The massive economic downturn has impacted on the corporate web big time so what now can be had for free in the Web 2.0 universe -- is likely to be more and more cost you in some (devious) way.
Thus Vodpod is now seeding its platform with adware.So if you click on a video in the panel above you get a screen equal in size to the vid dedicated to a flash generated advertisement. Not only is this obtrusive and the advertisements often sexist in nature, but Vodpod is piggy backing its advertising gnerated income grab on the productive output of those others, who created these vidoes, without their sanction. That makes me as video aggregator an agency pimp for Vodpod and I object to being forced into such a role.
So I'm going to drop the Vodpod video panel at the top of this page ASAP and find another means to share video content. Off site the LeftClickTV Channel on Vodspot is not so smothered in advertising and the page is bearable and may not get the chop.
On the web we're used to advertising -- on gmail, Yahoo groups, or whatever -- but Vodpod has gone about it with such crassness that they deserve to be cut loose. I think I won't be alone as what they've gone and done is destroyed the utility of what was a good Firefox add on.
So I'm exploring my options....
Here's a couple of experiments
