dessalles

And I’m back; blog vacation is over. Lots to catch up on. Let’s start with…

It’s been a few weeks since Usain Bolt’s celebratory 9.69 second jog, the Olympics are well and done, but I still find myself fascinated by the he’s-either-on-steroids-or-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-sprinting-is-wrong 100m world record. I catch myself watching the final once or twice a day (I have the video on my phone); it probably won’t cease to amaze me until he finds a tenth of a second in his busy schedule to surpass it.

I, like the large majority of Americans, did not get to watch Bolt’s run live that Saturday morning as exclusive television rights kept major competitions off the air until NBC’s nightly primetime broadcast. That’s not to say I waited until 9pm; I waited about 15 minutes.

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As far as I could gather at the time (and I really wish I had a better way to capture the data), the first YouTube video of Bolt’s record breaker was uploaded at 10:37:02am EST (-5:00), about 6 minutes and 52.31 seconds after the race ended.

<entry>
<id>http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/OL0uEG6Ztjk</id>
<published>2008-08-16T07:37:02.000-07:00</published>
…

The publisher (young, British, impressive selection of homemade wedgie videos) made the interesting choice to avoid the inevitable copyright takedown by hiding the picture - it’s still up, just audio. [UPDATE: Alas, our young lad's account seems to have been suspended due to a terms of use violation, so the video is gone.] 5 minutes later the first actual video appeared, and as expected it was gone shortly thereafter.

<entry>
<id>http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/WYXUWFqj1s0</id>
<published>2008-08-16T07:41:52.000-07:00</published>
…

From that point on, a video of the 100m final appeared on YouTube about every 90 seconds for the next half hour or so; with takedown notices issued just as fast. While many point to illegal downloads as a measure of demand for a copyrighted digital product, what does the quantity of uploads indicate? And particularly, in the case of uploading a recording of a live event, what does the immediacy of the uploads indicate? Knowing well that the lifespan of their videos won’t exceed 15 minutes, what motivates the uploaders? Is it social media status, public service, ideological battle against copyright, just a play for view counts or simply content spam?

Regardless, it was impressive to watch the videos pour in - a sort of crowd-sourced live blog in the form of YouTube search results. And while the large majority of the videos were just recordings of television broadcasts, a few were actually recorded frist-hand by attendees.

As user proficiency of social media sites increases, there’s an increasing number of online services through which events and experiences are documented in near real-time - and increasingly via mobile devices. Between YouTube, flickr and twitter, some sort of digg spy-esque real-time aggregation of that almost-real-time user generated content might be pretty interesting.