Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Hm, more food for my video iPod which hasn't arrived yet.

Revver ("a Flickr for video") is a new video publishing community site which allows you to upload, share, watch, and tag videos for free. You need a special upload tool for uploading videos (there's a Windows version, a MacOS X version, and a Java version which probably works on Linux).

They intend to give the creators of the videos some money by attaching a clickable advertisement frame (the so-called RevTag™) at the end of each video. Everytime a viewer clicks the ad, the video creator gets some money. While this might be a great idea, it still leaves me with a strange feeling (the ad is not on a webpage, it's appended to the video itself!)...

Some noteworthy details:

• They currently have a size limit of 100 MB per video.
• They don't censor the videos except for obvious copyright violations (porn yes, illegal stuff no).
• You get 50% of the money and Revver gets the other 50%.
• You need a PayPal account to get the money.
• "Your videos stay on Revver for as long as they generate a reasonable amount of revenue" (no unlimited hosting, it seems).
• The videos are automatically put into iTunes and formatted to work with the video iPod.
• All videos are automatically converted into the mov format.
• The default license for the videos is the Creative Commons ShareAlike license (you can probably choose others, I didn't check).

More information is in their first blog post, and in the FAQ.

A final quote from the blog post:

It’s a new game, we’re thrilled to be in it, and we tip our hats bigtime to the Ourmedia crew, the YouTube crew, the Participatory Culture crew, the Creative Commons crew, and all the other crews that came before us.

All in all this looks quite promising, and I'm curious how it will develp and grow...

(via Boing Boing)

I've been a happy Privoxy user for quite some time now. I can really recommend it to anybody who wants to get rid of all the nasty stuff floating around on the web these days. From the Privoxy homepage:

Privoxy is a web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, modifying web page content, managing cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk.

The most useful feature for me is that it automatically removes almost all of those ugly flash-based ad banners.

My todo list:

• Fine tune the filters for my needs. I'm currently using the stock Debian package of Privoxy, without any customizations.
• Check out Neil van Dyke's privoxy rules which filter even more nasty stuff.
• Check out the combination of Privoxy and Tor for anonymous browsing.