While I don’t really tend to cover current events, the blogging (and the Flickring, and the YouTube activities, etc) going on about the Thailand coup is fascinating. Of course, this post sums up the activity better than I ever could.

MTV’s recently announced “Virtual Laguna Beach” sounds a lot like Second Life (among others). 22,000 (beta testers? early participants?) have signed up, according the the New York times article, and VLB is one of three virtual worlds planned. Eventually, users will be able to buy “gold membership” - giving them a house, and a car, and probably other items as well.  The NYT story listed Second Life (and some similiar virtual worlds, like There) which is interesting in light of statistics cited in early 2006 that the median age of SL users was 36, with the average age being 32.  It will be fun to see if younger groups will immerse themselves in something similiar.

According to the AP, Youtube and Warner Music have struck a profit sharing deal in which Warner will upload its music videos, while YouTube tracks user generated video with copyrighted material.  When they finid videos using Warner copyrighted material, Warner opts to “accept” or “reject” it. No word on what happens to the “rejected videos,” but pity the poor person whose job it is to watch the thousands and thousands of bad basement lip synching to flag them for their supervisors.

The blogosphere is all abuzz about the possible lawsuit of Universal Music Group against YouTube. Granted, it was bound to happen at some point, with the multitude of copyrighted material up there - but I would hazard a guess that the standard train of thought for someone watching a video of someone in their basement singing along to a new song, would be more along the lines of Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants, who notes “does anyone think that a video of someone lip synching to a song (recorded with poor quality) is something I want instead of a CD or an iTunes download?” than “Oh, well, next time I want to hear this song, I’ll just bookmark this YouTube page and listen to it.” Too much trouble.

Granted, if ripping YouTube videos becomes easier (like this) then I could see some challenges.However, I’m not sure the average YouTube user would want to go to all the trouble (would they?)