Didn’t notice this till now, and apparently Michael Arrington hadn’t noticed it either in his recent coverage of video sharing sites. YouTube has (presumably under pressure from copyright paranoid’s in hollywood limited videos to ten minutes in length.

Way to kill the future of your site guys. Seriously, this is a moronic move – they are doing several very foolish things. The first is effectively bowing to Hollywood on the upload of ‘pirated’ material to their site, opening the door to further picking up the soap and litigation down the road – think Napster. The second is discouraging the few users of the site (like Technolotics), who upload wholly original content – already constrained by the 100meg file limit. The third is positioning themselves as the myspace of digital video clips (brash, unfriendly and money grabbing), a bad move, as what differentiated youtube from say Ebaums were two things, its flash transcoding, and its identity as a ‘credible’ community hub for original content, the Flickr of video.

But if as Ars Technica impute, YouTube exists purely as a fly by night, hype and flog operation, their behaviour becomes a lot more comprehensible.

Update: Thanks to Dave of Dave’s Rants for pointing out that YouTube have launched a ‘Directors’ programme, allowing the upload of longer content and a variety of other benefits, to those willing to sacrifice anonymity. It seems a very reasonable compromise, and though I’m no lawyer, the terms of the agreement seem fair too.

In other news, Rowan Nairn, creator of the worlds first (and best) feed grazr ‘Opod‘ was kind enough to stand in for me on this weeks ‘Technolotics’, may I be the first to congratulate him on being a threateningly effective replacement.

Inspired by Aric McKeown’s hilarious ‘Make Me Watch TV‘, I’ve become addicted to watching the curmudgeonly House M.D., played with immense satisfaction by long time Stephen Fry collaborator Hugh Laurie. House is the Chuck Palahniuk novel of tv drama, grotesque, charming, stylish, and utterly formulaic; perfect downtime television.

Also, can’t stop reading this poem.

Ug, back to the grindstone, or maybe watch a final episode of ‘House’.