The BBC is reporting that YouTube have signed a deal with Warner Music that will allow them to not only feature legal music videos on the video sharing site, but it also will officially legalise YouTube users’ home-made videos that feature any Warner Music titles.

Apparently, YouTube has implemented a system whereby they can track when copyrighted content from Warner is being used, and Warner will receive royalties relevant to the amount of their content on the site.

This is a serious move by YouTube as many were starting to doubt whether the service would survive, with a very high level of litigation threat from the media giants (over all the user-generated content that used copyrighted content). This move however, not only removes that threat from Warner, but it signals the intent of YouTube to the rest that they want to stay within legal boundaries.

It also could be a signifier of the evolution of YouTube. For some time, the site has boasted very high traffic rates and is quickly becoming one of the most popular sites on the web. However, as yet YouTube haven’t really been able to capitalise on that traffic and turn it into much revenue. This move by YouTube may show that they are starting to think about ways to monetise the vast amount of traffic they receive each day.

This deal may well prove to be the pivotal movement for YouTube in terms of revenue; from being another site with Google AdSense to being a true money-making source.

Engadget have the story that Microsoft’s upcoming Zune digital audio player will probably have a battery life of around 12 hours for audio and 3.5 hours for video.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that those figures are quoted for having the Zune’s wireless functionality switched off, and the wireless networking is likely to drain a lot more charge.

So let’s compare this to the latest iPod battery life (that’s the big 80 GB video one we’re talking about here). The new iPod is stated as having 20 hours of audio and 6.5 hours for video (playing 640×480).

Now, of course, we always need to take manufacturer’s battery life statements with a generous helping of scepticism, but still, it appears the iPod has the edge here (unless Apple are ‘optimising’ for the benchmarks a bit more than Microsoft dare to). The audio figure is unlikely to make much difference in a real world environment (I’m guessing most people would put their iPod on charge within 20 hours of continuous playback), but the relative difference between the video figures is, frankly, astronomical.

The iPod gives you almost double the quoted video battery life of the Zune and although Microsoft haven’t confirmed these figures, I doubt they’re going to be far off the figures of the first Zune player.

So, is battery life that important? I guess we’ll see - and no doubt that as the Zune evolves as a brand, we’ll see new players with new features and different statistics.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is Novell’s second crack at trying to convince businesses to buck the trend of using Windows desktop machines in favour of a Linux solution. As the name suggests, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) is based on the openSUSE distribution (née SUSE Linux, which was acquired by Novell some time ago).

In this review, I’m going to take a brief look at SLED and what it brings to the table, what it does for Linux and the Linux desktop and how viable it is as a desktop solution within a business environment.
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Well, it’s been a big week in Digital Audio Players (DAP). Apple updated all three iPod ranges, and Microsoft announced their competitor, the Zune. We now have the real fight on our hands; two technology giants who desparately want control of this area, each with their own strategic advantages and disadvantages. To split it up: (more…)

There can be no doubting the impact that the iPod has had on not only the tech industry, but also on the western world. I suspect that the iPod, for example, is responsible for much of the increase in use of London Buses seen in recent years, since people now have something to listen to without the luxury of a car stereo. A video of the announcement of the original first generation iPod is on YouTube, and its quite nice just to look back occassionally and see where we’ve come.

I think the video goes some way to explaining why the iPod has been successful. Steve Jobs makes a big point in his keynote about Firewire; at the time USB 1.1 was still in use, and Firewire was and is far superior to that. Firewire was Apple’s invention, and was thus found on all Macs, but not many PCs. Once USB 2.0 came along, rather than cling to Firewire, they moved on, making the iPod appeal to more users. It’s just a small detail, but I think the whole idea of adapting and not being determined to stay on one line of thinking probably played an important part in getting Apple to the top of the MP3 player market and keeping them there. That and keeping people locked into their system through the iPod/iTunes vicious circle, a method not mentioned in this keynote!

[via Digg, but different YouTube clip so that I could embed it]

I just opened Firefox to find tabs on my Ajax Google.com/ig page. As far as I know this is a new feature; I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere else.

There’s recently been a lot of activity around Google IG, what with the new ‘recommended items’ module released and the partnership deals that are starting to emerge. Google needed to ramp up the features to compete with excellent services like Netvibes (which recently got some serious VC funding) and Pageflakes.

The only thing is, what tabs should I add? Any suggestions?

Simon Dickson reports that Hitwise has released a new source of statistical information called ‘Data Center‘, and one of the bits of information it provides is the top websites. I thought it would be interesting to look at the sites we visit the most, and see just how important a good site design is in attracting and keeping visitors. Below is the chart, including a rough mark out of five for my impression of the design, based on usability primarily, but also aesthetics. (I would have given Myspace less, had I decided to give half marks!) (more…)

CrunchGear are reporting that Microsoft have released official details of their Zune ‘iPod killer’ to the press.

The first players will have 30 GB of storage, come in black, white and brown and will have built-in wireless capability as well as support for most major audio playback formats (including WMA locked with Microsoft’s DRM).

The wireless functionality of the Zune is particularly being pushed by Microsoft, as apparently you can share music with other nearby Zune users using the wireless capability. Any tracks you share with others can be played by the other person three times (or stored for up to three days, whichever is quickest). Interestingly this not only applies to DRM’d songs from online stores, but any unprotected content as well.

The ‘Zune Marketplace’, the Zune’s download store, will reportedly feature a normal purchasing plan, where you pay for each song but also a Zune Pass option which will allow unlimited downloads for a flat fee.

This announcement of Zune news comes very quickly after Apple’s announcement of new iPods, but there wasn’t half as much buzz about the Zune information than there was about the Apple event. Admittedly, a lot more was being announced at the Apple event, but Microsoft really could have done with capitalising on some good old rumour and speculation to hype up the press release.

I don’t think Zune will kill the iPod - it will certainly do Apple no favours, but I can’t see it dramatically turning the tides in Microsoft’s favour.

There’s no firm release date or pricing information available yet, but apparently the first Zune players will ship by Christmas.

You may have read recently on TechCrunch that Live.com (MSN Search’s replacement) has now gone live. In fact Microsoft are busy at work rolling out a lot of new services and rebranded MSN services.

MSN Soapbox, essentially Microsoft’s YouTube clone, is under development as well. But obviously, for the time being at least, it’s still branded with the ‘MSN’ brand rather than taking up the new ‘Windows Live’ livery.

I’ve got another example of this inconsistent behaviour by Microsoft. UK 3G mobile phone provider, 3, are now advertising free ‘MSN Messenger’ on selected handsets (as an introductory offer). Obviously Microsoft are involved in this deal with 3, so why have they again chosen to plump for the older name? The desktop software is now called Windows Live Messenger, and although generally people still refer to it as simply ‘MSN’, why aren’t they pushing the name change harder?

Perhaps they want people to recognise the MSN brand still, but if so, why launch some stuff as Windows Live and leave some as MSN? They are obviously going to watn to rebrand the MSN service, so why not do it all at once, or run ads saying ‘Windows Live is the new MSN…’ or similar?

It seems a very strange idea in my eyes to use different brandings here and there if Microsoft really are serious about the rebranding of the MSN services (everything seems to point at full rebranding so far). So I’m really at a loss to understand these two moves. Someone, enlighten me.

The next version of the Democracy Player, 0.9, has been released. Democracy is an online video player, which is able to download videos from RSS enclosures via http and Bittorrent. This release has some significant new features (in their own words):

Playlists
You can now create playlists to organize your favorite videos. I have a playlist called ‘Keepers’ that I’ve been using to keep track of videos that I like to show people as we’re sitting down to watch a movie at my house, kind of like previews, but better.
Folders
To organize your channels and your new playlists, you can now create folders.
Flash video
Tons of video online is now in Flash format. The Windows and Linux versions of Democracy Player can now play Flash videos from most flash hosting sites. In addition, Google Video and Youtube have been added to the search choices. (The Mac version can’t play flash in the main window, but we’ve made it easy to launch it in a separate window.)
30 Languages
This is the first version of Democracy to support non-English languages on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Democracy is at least partially translated in over 30 languages.

Beautification and polish
There’s lots of other UI polishes, that look nice and improve usability.

I love the concept of Democracy Player, and think it fills a very important niche in new media. Up until now it has suffered from bugs and frankly from a lack of good content, but both are beginning to become less of an issue, and I see Democracy becoming a program I use every day in the future. An extra bonus is that it has a GNU (open source) license, meaning that it really is democratic!