Chris Betcher

YouTube has been around for quite a while now, and apparently I've been part of its history for much of that time. The domain, youtube.com , was registered in February 2005 and I joined YouTube just over a year later in May 2006. I uploaded my first video in August 2006. So I guess that makes me an early adopter? Google bought YouTube in October 2006 for USD$1.65 Billion. I recall that the tech press was stunned by the purchase price at the time, as that seemed like a ridiculous amount of money. Of course, by the silly standards of some tech purchases since then (like Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp for $19 Billion, for example) YouTube was quite a bargain. YouTube mainly makes money by showing ads, although I must admit I spend pretty much all my YouTube time in Google for Education accounts where there are no ads, or in my personal Gmail account where I pay for YouTube Red, which again, has no ads. So I still get a little surprised when I watch YouTube on someone else's...

You probably realise that when you search for something on your computer that your browser keeps a history of those searches (and page visits).  You can of course clear that browser history at any time.  (For those of you with paranoid tendencies, perhaps you should be using Incognito Mode?) You might also realise that a full history of your search and web browsing activity is kept by your search provider. In my case, that's Google. This search history is not kept on your own computer, but rather on the search engine's servers. You can also visit your web history page online to review (and delete if you wish) your search history or the pages you've visited. But what I think is not very well known is that you can also see the full history of all the voice searches you've ever made using your phone.  Yes, every time you pick up your phone and say "Ok Google", then ask a question, that search is recorded.  And by recorded, I mean the actual recording of...

In 1963, when I was born... Television was delivered over the airwaves. In black and white. We had four channels to choose from and we had to get out of our seat to change them. And we hardly ever heard a swear word. Radio was only available using an AM signal. In mono. If you didn’t like the song that was on, you could switch to the other station. If you wanted to listen to music on the go, you had a small transistor radio with a tinny speaker or a single earpiece. And if you wanted to hear “your show”, you had to listen while it was being broadcast. Newspapers were printed on paper and printed every 24 hours. The time between a story happening and us finding out about it was often several days. Which stories made it into the newspaper was decided by an editor somewhere. The text on the page was made by rolling ink across the tops of slugs of lead in shape of letters, assembled to make sentences, and then pressing those inked letters against paper. The paper was then folded, cut, bund...

One of the things that my American friends are always very proud of is that they claim to live in a country where dreams can come true and where everyone has an equal opportunity of success. They call it “ The American Dream ” and all over America young children are told that anyone - even them - has the opportunity to grow up and become president one day. Of course, if you’re a young American, the reality is that while anyone can potentially become president, the probability of it actually happening to you is somewhere around 1 in 307,006,550 (which is roughly the number of people living in the USA at the moment). So while you possibly could become president, it’s far, far, far more likely that you won’t be! If you did happen to somehow end up as the President of the United States, the odds get even more staggeringly unlikely that your son or daughter will also become president. Mathematically, the chances of two people from the same family both becoming President of the USA are ...

Great video. Great message. I must read this book. Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson.

As you may have noticed, Facebook has been copping a great deal of flak in the media lately for recent changes to its privacy policy. There is growing evidence that Facebook as a company has few scruples or ethics when it comes to the way they view and use your personal data. The company has continually “baited and switched” the privacy settings in Facebook to the point where they have become so confusing and complex that few people truly understand them. There are something like 50 choices leading to about 170 different privacy variations possible, all needing to made in multiple locations in Facebook, with very little consistency or “expected behaviour” between them... consequently, there could be significant parts of your personal data that is being made public without you realising. Facebook seems to be working on the principle that most users never look at the default settings or take the time to think through their options. The most recent changes made to their privacy polic...

I got interested in computers and their potential uses in teaching and learning way back in 1982 when I was at Art School/Teachers' College. I met a guy named Colin who worked in the media center at the art school who had taught himself how to program in AppleBasic on the original Apple IIe machines . He was doing all sort of really interesting stuff with these machines, writing his own programs for randomised poetry, creating graphics, creating maths problems, etc. Colin and I became good friends and I asked him to teach me how to program too. It was INSTANTLY obvious to me that computers and technology generally could be used to support, assist, extend and just generally make learning a whole lot more interesting, and even as a preservice teacher in the early 80s I was always trying to come up with interesting ways that computers could be used to make school more interesting. Like most colleges at the time, the college I attended didn't offer any computer-based courses. I w...

There was an interesting story in today's news about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's outburst at an iPhone-carrying Microsoft employee. Apparently, Ballmer was addressing a company gathering when the employee pulled his iPhone out to take a picture of him. Ballmer went nuts. He grabbed the phone, ridiculed the employee publicly, then pretended to stomp on the device. You can read the full story over on Engadget. There is even an alleged photo taken as Ballmer reached for the device. Ballmer is an interesting character. Certainly there is plenty of evidence on YouTube of his over-the-top antics as he revs up Microsofties with his ranting and raving, screaming and yelling. And who could forget his chant of "Developers! Developers! Developers!" at a gathering of software developers, as he tried to make the point that Microsoft's success was partly due to its army of, well, developers. It's even spawned a remix version. Even back on the very early days ...

One of the side effects of the new web is greatly increased disintermediation , or cutting out the middleman.  It seems that everywhere you look, entire industries are being turned upside down because the web makes it so easy for people to completely bypass the traditional "middlemen" that we all used to rely on so heavily.  Musicians are bypassing record labels and releasing their music directly to their fans.  Authors are bypassing publishers and using services like lulu.com to self publish. Homebuyers often know just as much about the real estate markets as the agents.  Ordinary people can buy and sell shares without the need to go though expensive stockbrokers.  In all of these processes (and many others like them) unless the middlemen add real value along the way, they face eventual extinction.  Why would you continue to pay someone to do something that you can just as easily do yourself? This disintermediation seems to be obvious in three main areas.....

I've been trying to remember the very first time I went online to the Internet. I started thinking about this when I read about the recent passing of Olive Riley, a 108 year old woman who regularly wrote on her Blogger account and was known as the World's Oldest Blogger . Olive passed away this week on the NSW Central Coast, just a few months before her 109th birthday, God bless her. In the newspaper article about her passing, her Grandson notes how she was regularly communicating with people from as far away as America and Russia. I suppose I take for granted just how easily we can communicate with people from far away places. A quick glance at the Live Feed widget on this very blog shows me that in the last few hours I've had hits from India, America, Norway, Canada, the UK and of course all over Australia. A quick peruse through my open Skype contact list shows a similar global diversity, with people listed there from virtually every continent except Antarctica. I...

My friend Anne Baird blogged today about her insights regarding the use of Creative Commons as a form of managing the usage rights to creative works such as music, pictures, video or writing. For many people, the only law they have ever heard of in regard to using the work of others is copyright law, and this is usually interpreted as "you cannot use this!" That's not exactly correct of course... copyright means "you cannot use this without asking my permission". Unfortunately the process of getting that permission is usually not so simple, so for most people the choice is to not use the work at all, or to use it illegally. Enter the world of Creative Commons. Creative Commons, or CC for short, was launched in 2001 and is a licensing model for defining how an artistic or intellectual work may (or may not) be used. It sits in that void between the restrictive copyright model and the free-for-all that is the Public Domain. Too often people assume that ...

You might think that your world of browsing the web begins and ends with that little blue "e" logo on your desktop, but you might be surprised at just how many other (better?) alternatives exist out there. Over the years I've probably had a play with just about every web browser I can lay my hands on, but I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the others. Browser life began in 1992 with the granddaddy of them all, Mosiac. However, after the famous "browser wars" between Netscape and Microsoft many years ago, it seemed like Internet Explorer was destined to be the only browsing kid on the block. Of course, for the alternative thinkers amongst us, there were some notable options like the wonderful Opera browser which just got better and better with every version, but for all intents and purposes it appeared that Microsoft had won the browser battle with the ubiquitous Internet Explorer . Was it a better browser? Probably not. Like so many tec...

I've been reading Thomas Friedman's book "The World Is Flat" and have been finding it a compelling and interesting read. I think he has really clearly identified and explained the trends and convergences that have brought us to what is arguably one of the most important inflexion points in world history. If you get a chance to read the book I suggest you do so. In the meantime, you might like to have a look at this video ( http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/264/ ) of Friedman giving a speech to a group of students and staff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this talk he gives an excellent overview of the book and explains some of its key ideas. The speech lasts about 75 minutes in total and its the sort of thing you need to really sit and watch in its entirety, but well worth it. Maybe watch it instead of TV one night...

One of the interesting concepts I've read about is The Long Tail . It's a phenomenon I'd noticed and had kinda thought about but had never really heard it explained in such an obvious way. The term was coined by Chris Anderson from Wired magazine. One of the interpretations of the Long Tail basically refers to the notion that if lots of people are able to publish content to a small specialised audience that is so niche and so targeted then the collective sum of all these small publications will start to eat into the audience share of the mainstream media publications. If you map this phenomenon as a graph of the popularity of various publications versus the number of actual publications, then the graph looks like the diagram here... a chart that has a small number of publications with relatively high levels of popularity on the left, and a large number of publications with low levels of popularity as you move to the left... giving the shape of the "long tail". ...

According to this article from Edutopia , the one billionth user connected to the World Wide Web sometime last year. I have no idea how anyone arrives at these sorts of statistics, but it probably doesn't really matter. The point is that it's a big number, and there are lots and lots of people from all over the world who are becoming part of this phenomenon we call the Internet. But in the age of Web 2.0 - the read/write web - I found this paragraph particularly poignant... "The striking thing to me about that milestone is not the enormity of the number, however. More interesting, perhaps, is that the one billionth person to jump onto the Web could just as easily been an eight-year-old kid from Sweden or the South Bronx (or, for that matter, an eighty-year-old from South Africa) who sat down at a computer, opened a browser, and for the first time started connecting to the sum of human knowledge we are collectively building online. Furthermore, that eight-year-old had jus...

I just watched the most amazing documentary on the 9/11 attacks from 5 years ago. It was just called, simply, 9/11 . It was on TV last night, and had a bunch of footage that I'd never seen before. Considering the huge amount of press coverage that the attacks got when they first happened, and how well documented the events have been since then, I was surprised to find that there was still such a large chunk of footage that I'd never ever seen before. The documentary was made by two French filmmakers that were actually making a doco about a young firefighter who had just joined the FDNY. They'd been following this guy around, filming and getting to know the other fireys for a few months and had been taking their cameras out on shoots to local fires, etc. They just happened to tag along when the guys were called out to attend an unknown event on the morning on 9/11, not really knowing what they were in for. Turns out that one of the filmmakers got caught up in the foyer ...