internet

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev covered a lot of ground in his annual state-of-the-nation address on Thursday, but the after-speech reports were dominated by talk of time zones, YouTube clips and the body language of Vladimir Putin.

Last Monday, Yahoo pulled the plug on their once-popular GeoCities network.  If you surfed the web in the late 1990s, then you probably visited your share of GeoCities sites, a big part of the reason Yahoo paid $3 billion for GeoCities back in 1999 (GeoCities were once the third most-popular Web destination).  The idea of GeoCities was that individual sites were grouped by theme into virtual “cities” – for example, Wall Street was the “city” for business-themed pages – it was a forerunner to the social networking sites that would eventually replace it.

What might have been the outcome of the 1979 Iranian Revolution had it been seen on YouTube?

Just take a look at this clip from YouTube contributor houmank of recent demonstrations in the city of Shiraz, Iran. Notice how many video cameras and cell phones are out taking pictures and video! They are everywhere!