ONN – Zennie62 “Yahoo Carol Bartz Michael Arrington F-Off YouTube Video” Used Without Attribution A Lot
I, Zennie Abraham, made the now very-famous “Yahoo Carol Bartz Michael Arrington F-Off Video” at TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2010. This one.
And from this one:
To set the stage, Bartz was then the much-criticized Yahoo chief executive. In fact, the barbs from TechCrunch came fast, and not even allowing the ink to dry on her contract, the blog’s co-editor Erick Schonfeld asked in 2009 “Who is this woman, and how is she going to turn Yahoo around?”
So, with that, and other no-so-nice things to say about Yahoo that came out of TechCrunch at the time, the stage was set for the much-anticipated interview between TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington and a rather prickly Ms. Bartz.
Arrington And Bartz Promised A Viral Video Moment I Planned To Get
As one of the media at the event, I made sure I had a front row work space, strategically positioned to make a video-blog of the moment. Bartz vs. Arrington was like Godzilla vs. King Kong at that time. Sitting to my left was none other than legendary tech blogger and friend Robert Scoble.
So, I recorded the talk, and in the middle of it, Bartz got off her now famous f-bomb, and I howled – you can hear me laughing so hard in the video, even Arrington looked over for a second. I also knew I had a winner of a viral video.
So, after the interview, and as pretty much everyone else was filing out and heading to early dinner, I stuck around to edit the video down to the main segment of just over one-minute in length, then I uploaded that to YouTube, and put it on my blogs on both my (now old but still running) Zennie2005.blogspot.com Blogger.com site, and my SFGate.com CityBrights page.
I was the only press person to get that video – and did so, even though I risked almost not meeting then-Google engineer Marissa Mayer in the hallway. Even Arrington himself said I “distrupted” his TechCrunch Disrupt New York event:
Even though I was obviously part of the press corp, the media that was not there had no problem trying to rip off my work for their own use without direct attribution to me, Zennie Abraham.
And I’m not referring to names you’ve not seen before, but media brands who’s names you have seen: The Atlantic, Gawker, Inquisitor, Business Insider, Newser, and The Observer. Not one of them bothered to actually bring themselves to write “video by Zennie62 on YouTube”, or “Zennie Abraham video”. Here’s proof: just go to Google and type “yahoo ceo tells michael arrington to fuck off”, click “videos” and you get this result.
And before you point to the mention of the video title and my face, I remind you that’s in the video and there thanks to Google / YouTube. Because even with that, The Atlantic wrote “This article is from the archive of our partner WIRE.”
Oh really? What about me – it’s my video?! I could screw up the crap out of all of those names if I took the video down – because a giant grey space would be placed where my video was, and the new reader what have to ask “what happened to the video?” Think about it. The Atlantic, Gawker, Inquisitor, Business Insider, Newser, and The Observer, and even Jessica Gottlieb, would have some explaining to do.
This video is about that and also about how Google allows Schema to cause pages in mainstream media outlets that committed this fraud to rank over my original YouTube video in search – video search. In an honest system my YouTube video should come up number one.
I have complained about this before, and even managed to get the Twitter-based attention of Google’s Danny Sullivan. And even though I’ve tried, I’m not sure if YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is listening or reading, or Google’s standing in her way, or what?
The Google system of favoring mainstream media websites using Schema allows institutional racism to flourish continuously, without algorithmic correction.
Google should stop it.
Stay tuned.
Oakland News Now Note: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest version of an experimental Zennie62Media mobile media video-blogging system network. This is a major part of our new approach to the production of news media. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and also seek interested content and media technology partners.