Social Networks – Future Portal or Fad? questions the long-term viability of social networking sites.  Exposing multiple anecdotes of teenagers who have become bored with Myspace (and thus, who have migrated on to other social networking sites), the article implies that social networking sites may simply be a temporary platform for exercising sociality.

Time expended on social networking sites is time that was previously exhausted by television watching.  Thus, social networking may elicit interest because of its novelty, but could quickly succumb to the “next big thing.”  This is a serious concern among users and corporations, alike, given technology’s high turnover for innovation.

Tim Wu from Slate Magazine discusses the development of legal protection against copyright infringement for internet-based services. He argues that Youtube may be safer from copyright litigation than many might believe. He notes that “in the early 1990s…Hollywood and the recording industry worked hard to make Internet companies responsible for any…copyright infringement that happened via the Internet.” Had this view, the idea that internet companies are liable for any infringement that occurs on their sites, been adopted by Congress, few if any Web 2.0 companies would exist today. Fortunately, Lobbyists working for firms controlling a large portion of internet traffic worked to convince Congress that “copyright law threatens to put a damper on the expression of ideas on the internet.” This forced Hollywood to settle for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects “Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users,” or in other words, sites using user-generated content. These sites are protected by the Safe Harbor clause in the DMCA which protects content sites and ISPs so long as they comply with takedown requests submitted by copyright holders. Wu notes that Youtube may be liable if it prosecutors can prove that it is aware of specific infringing material on its site. It may also be liable due to the fact that there is a search option on its services. Wu’s most interesting argument, however, is the idea that Hollywood and the recording industry may actually be fonder of the DMCA than previously believed. He states that these industries get the best of both worlds: if they do not want a clip on Youtube, they can simply issue a takedown notice and have the offending clip removed. If the infringing clip appears to be giving a boost to TV or music ratings, however, they can simply allow the clip to remain on Youtube. Thus, Youtube is protected by the idea of “tolerated use” rather than something like “fair use.”  While sites like Grokster were not covered under the Safe Harbor law, Youtube is protected by this provision of the DMCA.
Wu accurately conveys the crucial role that the DMCA plays in protecting internet content sites and ISPs, which is a crucial argument in my paper. Had the DMCA never been created, Internet sites could be just as liable for copyright infringing content as stores are for selling physical pieces of copyright infringing material. However, the lawmakers clearly anticipated the importance of user-generated content for e-commerce and thus created a protection clause for sites like Youtube. While Wu mentions that Youtube may be liable for its “search” tools, a similar clause in the DMCA may equally protect Youtube from prosecution for this feature. 512D states that sites which allow users to search for material are not liable for any copyright infringing items that users locate using search options. Thus, the DMCA successfully anticipates many aspects of these Web 2.0 sites and prevents content industries from suing services like Youtube.

From the website:

blinkx is the world's largest and most advanced video search engine. Fed by automatic spiders that crawl the web for audio video content and content partnerships with over 200 leading content and media companies, blinkx uses visual analysis and speech recognition to better understand rich media content. Users can search for content, create personal TV channels that automatically splice relevant content together. blinkx is a privately-held firm, based in San Francisco and London and was founded in early 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake.  

KinoSearch is a loose port of the Java search engine library Apache Lucene, written in Perl and C. The archetypal application is website search, but it can be put to many different uses.

Features

• Extremely fast and scalable - can handle millions of documents
• Incremental indexing (addition/deletion of documents to/from an existing index).
• Full support for 12 Indo-European languages.
• Support for boolean operators AND, OR, and AND NOT; parenthetical groupings, and prepended +plus and -minus
• Algorithmic selection of relevant excerpts and highlighting of search terms within excerpts
• Highly customizable query and indexing APIs
• Phrase matching
• Stemming
• Stoplists

Meta-Search and clustering engine for Environmental Health and Toxicology. Searches for information in databases from the NLM database system, NIH, and various U.S. government and international agencies.

"Blingo is a search engine with a twist. Each search on Blingo is also a chance to win a prize."  Google searching but every time you search you have a chance of winning a prize...no spam, they say.