<videovortex> mit project youtumb stores removed videos

[Geert Lovink]

> http://youtomb.mit.edu/
>
> When YouTube videos are removed by the site's administrators--in many 
> cases
> the pulled videos allegedly violate copyright--they vanish without a 
> trace.
> YouTube officials erase all data about such videos, including the 
> title,
> author, and how many times the video had been viewed. A new Web site by
> students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is preserving
> information about removed videos, and analyzing what kinds of clips are
> taken down. It's called YouTomb, and it is tracking more than 220,000 
> videos
> that might be removed in the future. Since the project started a few 
> weeks
> ago, it has detected more than 18,000 yanked videos. The site does not 
> allow
> users to see the videos themselves. But the students, who are members 
> of a
> student group called MIT Free Culture, hope that the data about the 
> videos
> could be helpful to researchers.--Jeffrey R. Young, CHE