At the Flow Conference this weekend, one of the sessions I attended discussed political videos on YouTube. An audience member raised the issue of fair use on YouTube, and I suggested that Google had little business interest in evaluating fair use claims after a DMCA copyright notice. I suggested that fair use under the DMCA would probably only happen after test cases were sponsored by academic or library hosting sites.

Now it appears support for DMCA fair-use rights comes from an unlikely quarter.

NewTeeVee has a story that describes how the McCain campaign has sent letters to YouTube, asking the service to evaluate the fair use of news material used in McCain-Palin advertisements. Apparently the service has taken down McCain ads after news organizations have sent YouTube DMCA notices because the ads poached materials from their broadcasts.

Obviously, I’d rather see the McCain campaign go down in flames and the DMCA repealed, but it’s interesting to see this organization stand up for fair use rights.

It’s not surprising to see organizations like Linux distributors use BitTorrent as a distribution platform, but it’s a little more of a surprise to see a video game studio. TorrentFreak reports notoriously conservative studio Electronic arts using the protocol and related tools for distrubuting beta copies of its forthcoming Warhammer Online title. Although I played Warhammer as a teen, I’m indifferent to the game, but it’s great to see mainstream organizations embrace BitTorrent. ISPs like Comcast that wish to throttle BitTorrent never had a good case for saying it’s used only for copyright infringement, but this makes it clear that it has legitimate, non-infringing applications.

I’m a regular reader of “FP Passport,” Foreign Policy magazine’s blog; I find it an interesting and convenient roundup of international news. Today they launched a new feature, “Must Reads,” which is a linkblog of unannotated news stories. Unlike Warren Ellis, I like linkblogs because it provides pointers to a lot of information that I don’t feel bad about ignoring. One thing I don’t like about linkblogs (and high-volume, high-noise blogs in general) is that they tend to crap up my primary newsreaders with high item counts. I have a couple of strategies for dealing with this, which I may detail later, but I think del.icio.us’ network feature is a great way to monitor high-volume link streams.

I just added “Must Reads” to NetNewsWire, and I noticed that it’s just a del.icio.us feed. I would have just added del.icio.us/foreignpolicy to my network on del.icio.us if I had known. Fearing poor reading comprehension on my part, I re-read the blog post announcing the feature, and re-assured myself that there was no mention of it as a del.icio.us feed; it has the pretense of being a feature of the site, rather than a scrape of another service.

This is something I would have just mentioned in the comments of the post – if it had a comments section, instead I’m posting it here. Anyway, del.icio.us has proved to be a popular and useful site for many Internet users, and I think it would have been kinder to readers to let them know they could read the linkblog through a variety of interfaces, including via the del.icio.us site. I imagine there are business reasons Foreign Policy would like to hide its use of del.icio.us, but I think it does a disservice to its readers.

Stories about how civil authorities are exploring Twitter use in emergency situations amuse me. It doesn’t seem robust or pervasive enough for true emergency communication. If the Personal Democracy Forum can bring it to its knees, a major hurricane or earthquake would snuff it out instantly. Andrew Sayer has imagined a Twitter timeline during a zombie attack, which I don’t believe is a scenario thought out so far by the pros.

Wordle is a cool information visualization tool that creates visualizations based on word count. I’m not sure how much more useful it is than your garden-variety tag cloud, except that it’s interactivity – it’s interesting to change color, font, and other parameters and watch the tool generate new visualizations. Each time it’s redrawn, the word arrangement is different, so students learning about tag clouds may gain a better understanding by creating new iterations of the same information. More than anything else, it’s fun to play with.

Here’s a Wordle-generated tag cloud of my del.icio.us tags: