Video

So I spot this link to a video about a competitor in the recent North Pole Marathon and bike race who decided to skinny-dip in the Arctic Ocean (because, if you’re gonna do a marathon and ride in a bike race at the pole, you might as well swim, too, to get the full “triathlon” experience). And there’s something about global warming awareness behind the guy’s dip in the frigid water. OK, this I gotta see. …

Alas, Youtube — in a fit of zero tolerance about nudity, I guess — has zapped the video. “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Oh, good grief. This is like those zero-tolerance policies at some schools, where the 2nd-grader gets suspended for having a plastic knife in his Spongebob lunchbox.

Practice some common sense, Youtube/Google! This is not pornography. Are you editing what gets published so as not to offend the Taliban? Get a grip, already!

As expected, there’s already video of Saddam’s hanging — I mean the actual death — online. A blog reader pointed me to this. It looks like someone had a video camera phone with them and surreptitiously shot the few minutes before the actual hanging, because the camera moves around a lot and after the floor drops and Saddam falls, there’s a period of black and lots of voices before the camera manages to focus again on his face and broken neck.

A check on Youtube turns up only images of Saddam up to the point of having the noose put around his neck — the same images as seen on TV, provided by Iraqi state television, which don’t include the actual point of death.

As I’ve said before, mainstream news editors can no longer expect to be the sole arbiters of taste when it comes to what the public sees in events like this. The full gruesome reality is available online and likely will be from now on when it comes to big news stories. The camera cell phone truly changes everything, because they’re now everywhere, and are easily concealed. (I don’t know that this was a cell phone video, but it sure looks like it.)

While someone alerted me to the video, it isn’t hard for anyone to find. A quick search on Technorati turns it up, although using Google it’s a bit trickier. It takes only the smallest amount of Internet savvy to find the graphic video of Saddam’s moment of death.

UPDATE: The link to the hanging video above was removed. However, do a Technorati search as I describe above and it’s easy to find. 

That’s a no-brainer, as far as I’m concerned. The answer is yes, when you’re talking about online. If you’re thinking of publishing gruesome photos on the font page of your newspaper, or video of the actual hanging on a news broadcast, then (especially in the USA, where we’re still puritanical about such things), don’t do it unless you’re prepared for a public backlash from more sensitive readers and viewers. But there’s no logical reason that I can see not to make it available online — where you can precede it with graphic warnings about what an online visitor will see if he/she clicks that link.

There are a few reasons for this:

1. This is big news, obviously, and it should be covered fully — and that includes offering images that may offend some.
2. The photos and videos of the hanging no doubt will be readily available somewhere on the Web. To not make them available (with appropriate warnings) just marks you as an anachronistic editor who’s still trying to enforce his/her own sensibilities on a public that no longer needs editors dictating what they do or do not see. The new-media ethic lets news consumers make up their own minds.
3. This will reflect my political bias, but I think that US citizens, especially, should see the results of their tax dollars at work. Electoral outcomes in the US have created the mess in Iraq, and I think that American citizens should see everything that their votes have wrought — from Saddam’s hanging to the gruesome violence and despair that is today’s Iraq.

The news media should not sugar-coat the reality of today’s world.

This looks interesting! … Wallstrip.

Want to see some absolutely stunning, cutting edge news multimedia? Look here:

Rising From Ruin: Two Towns Rebuild After Katrina from MSNBC.com. Wow.

Comment from MSNBC.com executive producer for editorial experience Ashley Wells, which accompanied his pointer to me: “And it only took 9 months!”

I can’t find news of it, but it appears that Google Video has been upgraded. A previous annoyance has been that after you uploaded a video, it was usually several hours (often, the next day) before the video was actually published so other people could view it.

Yesterday, the video upload service was down all day, but it came back today. I uploaded a video and was pleased to see that it was available for others to see right away. Fantastic! (I should note that the video I uploaded was not native Flash, so Google Video would have had to have done a conversion, since that’s the format used by the service.)

Has anyone seen news about this apparent upgrade?

Oh, c’mon NYTimes.com. You’ve got to be kidding! … Its article, “NBC’s Web-Only Episodes Offer ‘The Office,’ a Little at a Time,” contains NO LINK TO THE VIDEO. Writer Alessandra Stanley gets readers intrigued about seeing some Internet-only “webisodes” of the popular TV comedy The Office, but NYTimes.com editors force us to seek out the content on the Web ourselves.

That’s making it harder than it needs to be for the website’s readers. To resurrect an old term, that’s very user unfriendly of NYTimes.com.

Here’s the link to The Office webisodes, so you don’t have to go searching.

This is either a very unusual marketing technique or the height of geekdom. … My Boulder friend, Chris Ryan, president of Future of News, has aimed a web-cam at his saltwater acquarium. Go to the Future of News website and click on the Fishcam link in the left column.

This week we added a video component to my company’s debut sports website, YourMTB.com. It’s a participatory site, where mountain biking enthusiasts can share their passion for their sport by sharing stories of their adventures, photos and video clips. Here’s the main video page, where our users are just beginning to share videos — like this one.

You’ll note that we don’t actually allow our users to upload video to our server. Rather, we tell them to use one of several very popular video-uploading services like Youtube.com and Google Video. They simply copy a bit of embed code that each of the services provide into a form on our website. The process is easy and quick.

If you have a business like ours where you want people to share video, you may want to borrow our logic. We looked at the online video scene and couldn’t see a justification for re-inventing the wheel by creating our own video-upload feature. Web 2.0 is not about walled gardens, so the idea of spreading “our” content around and bringing in relevant content from other services makes perfect sense.

The obvious potential downside is the long-term viability of the video hosts we point our users to. I’m not worried about Google Video, but for a smaller service like Vimeo, who knows what the future will bring? And, of course, if one of them has an outage, that affects us.

A key premise of my company and its websites (like YourMTB.com) is that technology is enabling people to share more of themselves with the rest of the world. Cellphone cameras, tiny digital cameras and video cams … all make it easy to document more of your life and share it with others. Sites like YourMTB let people share their images with others who share their passions for a sport.

One tech development I’ve been watching closely is the advent of tiny digital video cameras. The editor of YourMTB.com, Walker Thompson, carries with him an iPod-size video cam from Samsung that also has a helmet camera. Out on the trails, Walker and I are both seeing more people riding with helmet cams, recording their adventures so they can share them.

That Samsung unit costs around $600, which isn’t bad for what it does. But it’s still too pricey for many people to justify buying it. But units like that are coming out in less expensive (if not quite as capable) form. As Walt Mossberg writes for the Wall Street Journal, the PureDigital video camera pictured here has arrived, at a price of only $130; you can buy it at stores like Target.

I’m expecting to see a bunch of these out on the trails, and a large wave of outdoor adventurers will have amateur videos to share.