The YouTube Symphony Mashup

Back in December of 2008 YouTube put out a call to musicians around the world to submit a video of their work with the hopes of joining the YouTube Symphony Orchestra and playing at Carnegie Hall. This week the Symphony performed and the Official Google Blog debuted a YouTube video mashup of some 3000 submissions to the contest. Enjoy...

Pirate Bay Founders Sentenced To 1 Year In Jail

The 4 founders of The Pirate Bay, the high profile file-sharing site, have each been found guilty of breaking copyright law by a court in Sweden. Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were all sentenced to one year in prison for their part in the crime.

After the decision Mr. Sunde tweeted: "Nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theatre for the media."

"got the news last night that we lost".

"It used to be only movies, now even verdicts are out before the official release."

BBC story here.

Ashton Kutcher Challenges CNN In Twitter Race To 1 Million Followers

Celebrity Ashton Kutcher has laid down a challenge for CNN in the race for Twitter supremacy. Kutcher and the Cable News Network are both over 850,000 followers with CNN holding about a 46,000 follower lead. In this video on Qik, Kutcher explains that he's found it "...astonishing that one person can actually have as big a voice online as an entire media company can have on Twitter..."

Kutcher and wife Demi Moore have embraced Twitter. In fact, Moore is reported to have recently had a Twitter conversation with a fan which resulted in police making contact with the fan, interveining, and preventing the individual with going through with their suicidal thoughts.

New Video Sharing Offering From H.P.

Hewlett-Packard (H.P.) has recently released a public beta of it's new video file sharing service called Gabble. H.P. has made the service so that videos posted are only viewable by people invited to your group, in contrast to YouTube and other sites that default to publicly viewable. According to the NYTimes Bits blog, it is hoped by H.P. that the service "...will appeal to families uncomfortable making their home videos public and to businesses that want to use videos as a collaboration tool."

Gabble is part of the company's plans for trying out a host of in the cloud services as it searches for a hit. “If they go viral and take off quickly, then we will support them,” according to Shane Robison, H.P.’s chief technology officer, during a recent interview. “If they don’t, we’ll take them down pretty quickly.”

Police Turn To Twitter For Help

Police often turn to the community for assistance and obviously have an interest in getting their message out by any means possible, to that end many police forces are now turning to Twitter. According to the Globe and Mail "Police are tweeting all over, from Canada to such U.S. cities as Boston, Baltimore, Richmond, Va., Boulder, Colo., Dalton, Ga., and Mount Pleasant, S.C. Fire departments do it in Napa, Calif., Charlotte, N.C., Trenton, Mo., Mesa, Ariz., and Oradell, N.J." Even the FBI is making use of Tweets "Since the fall, the FBI — FBIPressOffice on Twitter — has accumulated more than 2,000 followers, including people in at least 150 public safety agencies. Special Agent Jason Pack tweets about job fairs, computer worms, fugitives and missing children. During the presidential inauguration the FBI used the account to update information on checkpoints and subway stations that were closed in Washington."

Florida Woman Watches Via Webcam As Her Home Is Burgalarized

After having been robbed once previously, Jeanne Thomas of Fort Lauderdale Florida had a small video camera installed to allow her to monitor her home from work. Saying that she had a kind of "sixth sense" she logged in to find two men rummaging through her belongings. A call to 911 brought 18 police officers down on the home and the two were apprehended, check out the video and 911 call

First GeoCaching, Now Latituding!

The Official Google Blog is hoping to start a new trend that I'm dubbing Latituding. The idea is to get your friends together and send them out with their smartphones equipped with Google's Latitiude ,and then have them maneuver into position to spell out words. Check out the video and you'll get the picture (grown) ...