If you can ask questions, ask why there is no German version of Youtube please ;-)

The YouTube interface now has an easy way to switch between different localized versions of YouTube. In the upper right hand corner there is a flag for the specific localized version that you are currently using. Clicking on the flag gives you a list of all localized versions of YouTube.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1268/568078558_a81b45243d.jpg?v=0

Ask them about the 1TB of storage in Gmail rumor.
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/99064.html

The YouTube blog has been updated to reflect the new localized YouTube sites. Here is a snippet of that blog message.

"Earlier today we announced local versions of YouTube in nine countries – Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. As part of this first step in our international rollout, you can now enjoy fully translated sites, with localized home pages, content and search functions. As these sites evolve, so will your localized YouTube experience, including country-specific video rankings, comments and browse pages – all while being just one click away from the worldwide view."

http://youtube.com/blog?entry=ktewBXNbyTw

you might also ask "what was the motivation for redirecting users to a .COM site?"

http://blogoscoped.com/forum/99641.html#id99648

You can get all the flags here :
http://www.youtube.com/img/flags/

(Yeah, i'm really bored today.. :P)

David, That image directory shows a flag for Germany. So maybe it was supposed to be part of this set of localized versions but something came up either with partner issues or issues with local laws.

Maybe problems with strict German law, similar to those flickr have?

From US version of youtube, you can log in with your Google Account
From non-US versions, you can't.

I don't think German law is really that strict, we have popular local sites just like YouTube here... Flickr misinterpreted laws, I think...

If you like Tony's reporting, please digg it! http://digg.com/tech_news/Live_blogging_Google_Press_Day_2007

dugg ;-)

Live from Press Day: http://twitter.com/GooglePress2007

Tony will try to ask your question Tom on why there's no German YouTube yet... Tony says they slipped up and actually mentioned a German launch, but then corrected themselves: "Not German yet."

Thank you, at the same time the Twitter said "The lack of German version is due to outcomes of a market research."

And youtube.de is redirecting to pl.youtube.com, at least at my computer.

and/or at least in your location(?)

can you blog some of the Q&A's?

nmw:
Re: "what was the motivation for redirecting users to a .COM site?"

One of the likely reasons is the availability of .youtube.com cookies to maintain user sessions.

I'm running a Twitter from the Google Press Day 2007, but unfortunately wifi is terribly slow. I have recorded (voice) Q&A section, so will try to write something about it later.

Marcin thanks – I wonder how European users will feel about it.

Europeans don't care about .COM or .FR etc. If they can access to the site and understand it, no problem.

According to Tony, Marissa is speaking. I'm wondering what she can say different that previous speakers said...

I wonder if the Wifi there broke down (or if Marissa is just delayed). Can't reach Tony now, and he can't reach the blog, and the Twitter live feed by Piotr is also silent now...

there is a power outage...

(Tony's back!! Updates will continue!)

How the irony...
http://img460.imageshack.us/img460/8932/dailymotionironyiz8.jpg
Homepage of Dailymotion, European competitor of Youtube.

I v much hope – am I greedy? – that there is at least one EXTRA announcement, just to keep us excited.

Thanks for the live twittering Piotr!

Tony, if there is an other Q&A, ask please if the "new" Google Translate [you know, the second tab, for translated searches] uses Wikipedia to translate some things. For exemple, the TV-series "Without a Trace" is now translated correctly in French, with the real title of the TV series in French ("FBI : portés disparus") and not the basic translation of the three words "without a trace". [it's still the case in the first tab in Google Translate]

yes, Piotr – great job!

"Quality team works on new scoring algorithm to promote good videos and good images."

Does anyone have an idea about how such "value judgements" might be "operationalized" via an algorithm?

Where are Piotr and Tony?
http://www.loiclemeur.com/france/_1312_568126290_8265d71515.jpg
- from Loic Le Meur's blog -

Hey, look who's with Tony:

http://blogoscoped.com/files/more/pressday07/large/tony.jpg

How luckiest man on earth he is... :-)

TOMHTML: it's obvious: next to the power socket under the Access Point! :-)

Ha!

Nice pic Tony! :)

http://twitter.com/GooglePress2007

When you see a "free" computer, you enter "Be my computer" command and all your data appears... // Is GDrive going to be announced today?!

1 minute ago from web

   * With Friends
   * Previous

"Be my computer" command. Google wants to help information to travel with us. Eric wants to have his data and apps everywhere. 3 minutes ago from web
Google wants to backup user's data. Eric says that when a hard drive in a PC dies, a lot of users want to have a copy on Google's boxes. 4 minutes ago from web

Piotr said "Google wants to backup user's data. Eric says that when a hard drive in a PC dies, a lot of users want to have a copy on Google's boxes."
Is Eric talking about Google Account or GDrive? ^^

Nope false alert

Tony – so this is what you're little sojourn was all about! ;)

Great reporting ... and nice pic!

Wait
It's not over!!

Basically, Eric's iPhone was the hightpoint of the show!

does his iPhone works in europe?

At the same time, I'm always alarmed by the lame questions (French) journalist often ask. 60% of the Q&A are questions alreary answered somewhere.

yes. always the same. lika at cebit's knoppix speech. "how can i use knoppix with hardware XY?"

stefan2904: Should do – it's a GSM phone and I'm sure AT&T have a agreements with various European network providers.

Yea, but i thought the GSM-Chip isn's enabled...!?

Press day is officially over now, Tony says...

interesting:

"Eric: YouTube is not our tool to make money. We wanted just to get a big audience. Plans for YT: user happiness."

"Somebody just aked my question: When do you plan to launch GDrive. Eric was not specific on that. He said all was just a methaphore."

It was pretty useless press day. Good work tony though

'Marissa goes on to speak about improvements to web search. One example are Google’s alternate queries; search for ABC Survivor, and Google understands the semantics of this query and suggests “CBC Survivor” as well.'

Hopefully Google suggests CBS Survivor

Thanks for the find Nit, I corrected this now :)

I wonder if someone should tell YouTube their Union Flag is upside down... ;)

http://blogoscoped.com/forum/99641.html#id99656
Davids url is now showing a forbidden message

What? No product launches? :(Consider me disappointed.

The audio recordings of the press day are now available at the Google podium page:

http://www.google.com/press/podium.html

During the Eric Schmidt Q&A session, Tony asked a question:

<<Q: I'm Tony Ruscoe, Google Blogoscoped; Philipp Lenssen back in Germany would like to know, what lessons Google did learn from implementing self-censorship in China, and whether there's anything you would've done differently?

Eric: Hmm... the China conversation inside Google was the hardest decision we have ever made. It's a deicision that reasonable people – people in this room, for example – might disagree on, right, given the trade-offs.

The Chinese have this thing which is called the Great Firewall (which they never acknowledge) where they can block entire facilities and so forth. So we faced a choice of not being available at all, or following their local law. When we evaluated that, we decided to enter the market – which is the right decision in my view – but we also decided to put no *user-specific information* in China... the kind of things where you have personal privacy, and the Chinese law allows them to do lots of different things with that information, that just *can't* be done with Google information. We think that that's the right trade-off for Google, and for the Chinese citizens.

Our China traffic and China business is *booming* right now, so it looks like the strategy is working. My only regret is we should have done it much *sooner*. But it just took this long process to figure out what the right sort of "Google-value based" answer was.>>

(Why does Google so often say it faced a choice between "not being available at all," when that was never the issue? According to their own figures, it was about being blocked e.g. 10% of the time...)

James : http://blogoscoped.com/forum/99641.html#id99732

Ha! They blocked it!
Probably cause it contained Germany in it..

Too bad i didn't PS it.. :/

Butttt, i managed to find the flag!

http://www.youtube.com/img/flags/de_DE.gif

I rock or what? :P

Phillip:
Re: Why [...] According to their own figures, it was about being blocked e.g. 10% of the time...

Imagine that 1 out of your 10 queries would fail – would you continue to use Google or find another search engine? I guess now you have the answer why 90% availability is like no availability at all.

Besides, other venues, like Google News were completely blocked by GFW, now thanks to google.cn the uncensored content is at least visible.

You need to define "fail" – to me, censored search results are a failure (which is one reason why I never go to Google Germany, even though the chance of me hitting on one of those censored Nazi site results is rather slim, I suppose – in Google.cn, the chances to hit on a censored result are actually much higher).

But really, all I'm saying is that we need to stick to facts when we discuss the issue, and a statement like Google "not being available at all" is simply not based on facts, even according to Google's statements. Quite the opposite, at a time when Google was indeed "not available at all," Chinese users apparently successfully revolted and Google.com was unblocked again, according to information from a Playboy interview with the Google founders in 2004.

On the subject of Google News China: the site was self-censored before there was a Google.cn...
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2004/09/china-google-news-and-source-inclusion.html
... and what's more, Chinese users didn't actually need Google to access gov't-approved news sources, as these were available before Google News/ Google.cn.

Being blocked 10% of the time has a remarkable impact on how often people are willing to return to your site. It is quite akin to being blocked even more, in my personal opinion.

By "fail" I mean dropping the TCP connection, which is probably how the GFW works. From many articles I've read on the topic (written by Westerners) it may seem that an average Chinese is spending all their time searching on hot topics like Tiananmen, Falun Gong or critical comments on their govt. These are all important subjects of course, but let's not forget that majority of searches people need day-to-day are not infringing even draconian Chinese censorship. This is the place where google.cn and other localized search engines are an improvement over using e.g. US-based website with slow and lossy connection.

You talk about google.com vs google.de, but the former is censored as well and IMHO on topics, which an active user like us might encounter more likely than the Nazi stuff. I mean all those DMCA takedowns – there's quite a lot of them in the US.

About the user revolt – you can't rely on that. Maybe it were the users, maybe the gov't just wanted to stop the experiment. You'll never know. Given the nature of this gov't, if they really didn't want google.com accessible, they wouldn't give a damn about users' revolt on the net. In other words – either you play by their rules, or you give up the market completely. Had Google not done google.cn, users would eventually switch to those who entered the market earlier and were happy to censor results. The remaining 1% of queries about "hot topics" not available locally would *maybe* go to google.com.

I agree "being not available at all" expression was rather a figure of speech than a precise statistical measure of technical availability, but from business perspective it's quite correct. Customers are unhappy about performance and lousy connection, local competition works better, you're not getting many queries – hence you're not available in the market.

Philipp: Maybe there's something we don't officially know? This is pure speculation of course, but it's possible that the reason Google keeps positioning the decision as 'all or nothing' is because the Chinese government said to them, "Your share of the Chinese market is now sufficient that we will start blocking you 100% of the time if you don't start censoring results.".

Marcin:
> From many articles I've read on the topic (written
> by Westerners) it may seem that an average Chinese
> is spending all their time searching on hot topics
> like Tiananmen, Falun Gong or critical comments on
> their govt.

Agreed. Quite the opposite – as e.g. internet cafe traffic is often supervised, I'd seriously doubt many people will risk their safety by searching for these sensitive issues.

> These are all important subjects of course, but let's
> not forget that majority of searches people need
> day-to-day are not infringing even draconian Chinese
> censorship.

Sites like Geocities.com, or News.BBC.co.uk are completely censored, independent of whether an individual page in question contains a sensitive issue or not. So yes, many, many day-to-day searches are colliding with the Google.cn self-censorship (and Google.cn users aren't able to turn off SafeSearch added to that). In earlier tests, queries included things like ice cream, larry page, voting, europe, animals, what, we, world, anything, explosion, hearts, accused, etc. etc. These are all English words but many Chinese words are resulting in censored searches just the same, and I urge someone who masters the language to create a good list of words resulting in censored hits.

Google, of course, has all this data already – they can precisely measure how many searches everyday result in self-censored results – but so far they kept this secret. (The last number I remember being given out was the one about the percentage of pages being affected, but this can be substantially different from the number of searches being affected.)

And in Google News, you won't even know *what* is censored – all you know is that Google decided not to include some sources. Maybe some people don't use Google News and they play Counterstrike all day – I likely would have as a teen – but we probably agree on that some people use Google News, and those of us who do prefer to see different sides of issues being presented. (Same for Google Maps – many people *want* the satellite imagery, but Google.cn will self-censor it.)

> You talk about google.com vs google.de, but
> the former is censored as well and IMHO on
> topics, which an active user like us might
> encounter more likely than the Nazi stuff.
> I mean all those DMCA takedowns – there's
> quite a lot of them in the US.

I agree those can suck too for the searcher though I think we need to separate these issues:
1. site is removed due to anti-spam measurement
2. site is removed due to infringing the copyright of another searcher
3. site is removed (for that search, with that setting) due to an adult filter
4. site is removed due to being gov't critical

Human Rights Watch for example does not spam, they don't infringe on the copyright, and they don't show porn: they just accuse the Chinese gov't on certain human rights issues. Same for the Nazi sites, which are promoting their view that the German gov't is wrong on certain issues. I agree with human rights watch and I disagree with the Nazi sites, but particular agreement or disagreement shouldn't have anything to do with freedom of expression, which should hold true for both HRW and Stromfront.org.

But if we want to get into the DMCA discussion, I think the law should think of Google and other search engines as automated, objective by-standers (similar to a photo camera), so even DMCA infringements should *not* be decided in search results – if anything the *host* of illegal content is responsible and should be judged upon by law, not the search engine who takes a snapshot of that host. After all search results are only a symptom, and if the host disappears, after some time the specific search result leading to it will disappear too (or be rendered useless).

> About the user revolt – you can't rely on that.

Agreed. Especially now that there's Google.cn, I have serious doubts that Chinese users would ever revolt again when Google.com is down (and I've heard reports that indeed it's blocked more often by the great firewall now – but I don't have any reliable data on this [only Google and the Chinee gov't has, I guess] so I can't tell for sure).

> Given the nature of this gov't, if they really
> didn't want google.com accessible, they wouldn't
> give a damn about users' revolt on the net.

It depends how many of the search players get together – if they're united they have some leverage in the power play.

It also depends on how many people revolt – the Chinese gov't is actually very aware of this, and they're very scared of anything even remotely looking like a rebellion, suppressing all of it (from what I've heard on Tiananmen Square, if only a couple of people start forming something resembling a group, local police will break them apart; I've also heard that what the gov't feared most about Falun Gong was their ability to form groups seemingly instantly).
But if I'd be Chinese, and look at the bloody history of the country (Stalin-powered Mao directly or indirectly killed millions of people during the last century), I would now likely hope to overcome the problems in a peaceful manner. If I'd be Chinese, there would of course also be a big chance judgmenent of whatever I should do suffers from local propaganda, just like the chance for a German is much higher to suffer from western propaganda (I talked to Germans who believe censoring Nazi sites is good censorship, for instance).

> Had Google not done google.cn, users would
> eventually switch to those who entered the
> market earlier and were happy to censor results.

Which explains Google's business strategy, but this isn't an argument in the realms of morals... you still end up with the discussion of "is this compromise right." I'm not even arguing that when a business makes human rights compromises, it can increase their revenue. We saw that happen so many times in history (IBM delivering machines to the Nazis, for instance).

(In a pure business discussion, I'd be interested though how far Google could've gotten with a focus on producing nothing but branded, effective anti-censorship tools; pressuring the US gov't to force other companies to not ignore human rights; starting to get an image as being the only company that respects human rights without compromise, etc.)

Reto:
> Maybe there's something we don't officially know?

I bet there's a lot going on behind the scenes which we don't know, and which would greatly influence our judgment of the situation. Potentially this could make the opinion pendulum swing to either side. And I wish I'd knew all of it.

Matt:
> Being blocked 10% of the time has a remarkable
> impact on how often people are willing to return
> to your site.

Censoring 10%* of the time might have a remarkable impact on the searcher's opinions (especially their political ones, especially the ones regarding their gov't). That's the whole point of the Chinese propaganda machine. And Google search today, like Yahoo, Baidu and others, is a part of this propaganda machine (I don't mean this to be an accusation, I mean this to be a technical description of what's happening; I make a bet you and any other Google employees dislike censorship).

By the nature of Google's algorithms, it's even feeding on itself: sites you can't find will be sites Chinese webmasters will link to less, which will mean the sites will be ranked even lower due to missing backlinks/ PageRank... which could have the effect that if you remove the block of hrw.org today, it would be ranked lower than it would naturally.

And this is all completely ignoring the fact that any webmaster in China is more unlikely to link to hrw.org (even if they agree with that site, despite propaganda) because they risk their safety, thus affecting the effectiveness of the PageRank algo... but that is outside Google's responsibility. Though if Google would try to deliver a truly objective search engine for China, they'd actually include a "site is suppressed" factor in the mix, making sure that sites whose importance is artificially lowered will then be artificially increased in the algorithm (to make for a more natural result).

*I don't know that number, I'd be happy if you correct me with a real number...

Stupid Pit of arm licker And Monkey accomplice

David you do rock!;-)

He he..
Thanks James.. :P

The Press Day videos are now available...

Nikesh:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xxWX35BsQg

Chad & Steve:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDG2JKuHjLc

Marissa Mayer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNRE5x-V-sQ

Urs Hölzle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uvTIKe-CMo

Eric Schmidt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMgQGBl0T-A

Cool!

Found an article that says Google is considering a South Korean YouTube by years end. The article also mentions that Google released a YouTube localized version for Germany. Which we already now isn't true based on the Press Day announcements.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070622/tc_afp/skoreausitgoogle_070622051641;_ylt=AnsLYhMG_HmM4bbMz9GWUnzMWM0F

[Fixed a typo, Colin]

I've now uploaded all my photos from Google Press Day 2007 here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruscoe/sets/72157600445949884/

Thanks

What, no Picasa Web? :P

(Just kidding.. great photos Tony!)