Monday, January 08, 2007

YouTube blocked in Brazil

Reports are that the Brazilian courts have actually got their way and managed to get YouTube blocked throughout the majority of the country.

Model Daniela Cicarelli had taken YouTube to court and demanded over $100,000 in damages for every day her sex tape stayed up on the Google owned site. Unfortunately the publicity simply increased the reposting of the clip by users, and Cicarelli demanded that YouTube be shut down until the clip is permanently removed.

YouTube is governed by US law, and the court ruling had no chance of being actioned, however it seems that the Brazilian authorities might have intervened. It is being reported that BrasilTelecom, the most popular phone company in South Brazil, has blocked the site at DNS level. The Sao Paulo Supreme Court has denied issuing an order to block the site, despite the fact that another large carrier, Embratel, receiving a letter from a judge to block the domain www.youtube.com.

The OMM team are currently working on a mpg conversion tool to enable users to download the replay of images as a movie file, specifically to target sites such as YouTube. It seems however that our 100 odd Brazilian members might have to stick with Google Video instead.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

First poster snapshot - get your image ready

We're taking the first high resolution snapshot of the growing OMM on Monday 8th January at 12:00 GMT. This snapshot will be used in promotional marketing and to produce several large posters that will be able from the site.

Although each image will be very small, you might like to get your picture ready. In addition, selected images will be shown closer up, so again – prepare those images.

Consider yourself warned !!

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Numbercrunching : An update on some key figures

Today we've hit some numbers worth celebrating, so let's break them down. Firstly, we've just served the one millionth page of this website. To date, 168,000 unique visitors have looked at 1,000,000 pages on the OMM website.

The 15,600 images currently making up the OMM have now been replayed over 100,000 times – that's an average of 6 replays per member.

Over 15,000 comments have been posted by members, with the most popular image notching up just under the 200 comments (well done Angeli).

Lastly, the OMM currently forms a circular 'nebula' that would measure 8 meters in diameter if printed - just over the average height of a two storey house.