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.
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 !!
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.
New MySpace widget
I've felt for a long time that I've never really tapped in to the potential of MySpace. Millions and millions of people use it every day, and yet we've only ever had a trickle of visitors through to the
One Million Masterpiece, despite many many links on MySpace profiles and blogs.
So I want to have another crack. Eamonn has come up with a little widget that can be used in MySpace profiles and comments to replay images from the OMM at high speed, and allows people to click through to the user profile.
To insert the widget, visit the profile of the picture that you wish to paste, and copy the code in the Myspace Widget box. By clicking in the box all the necessary text will be highlighted ready to be copied.
Paste this code into your MySpace profile or comment, or on any other web page or blog and voila, a cool little animated picture.
First job is to try and seed MySpace with as many examples of the widget as possible, which is where our users come in. We are going to contact every opt-in member that has a MySpace account and ask them to post their picture. I'll report back on the success of this in due course!
Enjoy!
Growing growing growing...
The
One Million Masterpiece is growing strong. With yesterday's record day of 7,000 unique visitors and well over 2,000 new members we received a huge boost in our aim to break the current world record by the end of the year. With this in mind I thought it might be nice to look back at where this all started.
Just four months ago, at the end of the first week of its life, the OMM was made up of around 300 pictures. At that point the picture looked more like a little patchwork quilt, although the notorious black squares were already becoming a feature of the community. For two months progress was slow, and it took a couple of months to hit the 1,000 member mark. Around two months ago the project saw a shift in approach. Following feedback and intensive discussion the mandatory donation was dropped, and two levels of membership were created. The result was an immediate acceleration in the growth of the picture.
Yesterday we smashed the 10,000 barrier, and the 'OMM Nebula' grew by over 2,000 mini pictures. With more website features coming on line this month, we can all look toward breaking the official world record of 25,297 contributors some time soon.
Richard Branson meets…
My good friend Lee met Richard Branson today to interview him for a new web project he’s working on. The meeting is cool enough, but it’s the apparent ease that he got to meet him with that intrigues me.
I’ve been leaving celebrity sign-ups for the One Million Masterpiece to PR people, but now I’m thinking I might just try the personal approach. If I arm myself with a camera, why don’t I just go out there, meet these people and ask them to donate a picture on the spot. If they don’t they’ll look pretty crappy on screen, and if they do well, hey that’s more great publicity.
In all honesty I’m so busy that I doubt my plan will come to anything, but I’ll make some enquiries over the next few days and see if I can set anything up. Be warned celeb people!
Renderosity community backs OMM
After working with Lillian at
Renderosity for a few weeks we finally put out a press release and established some marketing on the Renderosity site. At the moment we have a front page news piece, banner ad rotation and placement in their Thanksgiving newsletter.
Apart from all the new members we've signed up, the Renderosity alliance has also led to a few other high profile links that are fueling a growth in traffic to the site. Yesterday we achieved over 3,000 unique visitors and a huge number of sign-ups, although this was offset by the deletion engine, which is removing 5 blank accounts per hour. BTW this is why my massive drop in membership never materialised, as Eamonn had thought ahead and decided to delete accounts slowly in order to allow new members to take up the slack.
So anyway, we all welcome Renderosity to the team. To find out more about them and their support of OMM read their
press release.
