Digital Media

While YouTube's move to accommodate videos uploaded in the 16:9 aspect ratio will put a smile on many people's faces, observers will likely interpret the move as a baby step to compete with the likes of Vimeo and Hulu in the entertainment arena.

(Credit: YouTube)

YouTube is expanding the width of its viewing screen, often adding black vertical bars to videos uploaded in the 4:3 aspect ratio.

(Credit: YouTube)

The video-sharing site announced the move in a blog posting Monday evening:

We're expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience.

The expanded viewing width will please YouTube users who are increasingly filming and uploading more videos to the site in the 16:9 aspect ratio. However, those worried that their 4:3 videos will appear stretched out need not fear. Those videos will be centered with vertical black bars flanking the image (like the infamous video depicted at right that captured a New York City Police officer tackling a bicyclist in Times Square).

While other sites such as Vimeo and Blip.tv have been using the widescreen format for some time, this move by YouTube seems to coincide with the recent announcement that MGM will become the first major movie studio to post full-length feature films on YouTube.

YouTube parent Google may be trying to duplicate the success of competitor Hulu, which has become the top outlet for watching full-length films and TV shows on the Web, and is reportedly generating as many ad dollars in its first year in business as YouTube, which will mark its fourth birthday in February.

A teenager lay dying in bed after swallowing a lethal does of narcotics while his suicide attempt is broadcasted to the Web. A group of concerned viewers attempted to intervene by alerting the authorities. Others however prodded the teen to take his own life with messages such as "do it."

Authorities in Pembroke Pines, Fla., are now trying to determine whether any of the people who encouraged the teen to kill himself violated Florida law, according to several reports. The incident began last week when the 19-year-old man Webcasted himself on Justin.TV and posted a message at a Web site dedicated to body building that he intended to commit suicide. About 12 hours later, police found his body in his Hollywood, Fla., home.

A. Randall Haas, a criminal lawyer in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., believes that state law gives prosecutors plenty of room to charge someone with manslaughter in cases where someone allegedly "assists" a person with suicide or a death occurs because of someone's negligence. Florida criminal statute 782.07 says: "The killing of a human being by the act, procurement, or culpable negligence of another...is manslaughter."

"It all comes down to how much is contributed to the victim being able to do the act," Haas told CNET News on Monday. "If you tell me you're depressed and want to kill yourself and I hand you a gun, I could be found criminally liable. If someone is on the edge and you help give him a push then you may have to answer for that. What has to be decided is whether communicating with someone over the Internet rises to the level necessary for someone to be considered culpable."

Some of the other questions that have yet to be answered are whether Florida officials can hold someone living in Los Angeles or the United Kingdom accountable for violating one of their laws. Also, should prosecutors bring charges, how will they prove to a jury that the people who encouraged the victim to kill himself knew it was real suicide attempt?

They can't, says Guy Womack, attorney with Houston-based Guy Womack and Associates. Womack is an expert at federal criminal law and recently tried a criminal case in Florida.

Womack said that the Internet is full of hoaxes and spoofs and game playing is common. He said all anyone charged for negligence has to say to defend themselves is that they had no way to determine the suicide attempt was legitimate.

"For prosecutors to prove their case, they would have to prove that that those watching knew what the (victim) was going to do," Womack said. "And there was no way they could have. They didn't realize what they were seeing. They couldn't reasonably foresee that he was going to kill himself."

Haas gave the same assessment of what a defense would be but said that authorities may feel compelled in a case like this not to let such callous behavior go unpunished.

"I'd hate to be prosecuting the case," Haas said, "but I got to tell you something else, I'd hate to defend it. A person that is in such fragile condition, those words could have put the person over the edge."

LinkedIn demonstrates how the new search platform works.

(Credit: LinkedIn)

Updated at 7:15 p.m. PST to correct number of LinkedIn members.

Nearly a month after unveiling a new developer platform, business social-networking site LinkedIn took the wraps off a new search platform Monday night.

In a summary of the new key features, Esteban Kozak, senior product manager at LinkedIn, said the new platform is "redefining the way professionals go about finding talent, business partners, customers, or a former colleague."

The site, which has about 31 million members, examined more than a billion search queries executed by members to create new productivity tools, Kozak says.

With the new platform, members will be able to refine their searches for other members using more than a dozen data fields, including "name," "company," and "school." The new platform also increases the amount of search space presented by eliminating the need to switch tabs.

The new "In Common" feature helps locate shared connections and groups you share with selected members. Members can also save searches and receive e-mail reminders when a search finds someone that meets the specified criteria. The search tool also adds a spell checker for names.

LinkedIn's new developer platform, which officially went live on October 28, includes an array of internal- and partner-created applications such as a "reading list" app from Amazon, a trip-tracking app from TripIt, file sharing from Box.net, and presentation apps from SlideShare and Google Presentation.

Sandwiched between the platform releases was the announcement earlier this month that the company would cut 10 percent of its workforce, or about 36 jobs, as part of a restructuring to focus on its revenue-producing businesses.

Talks to make The Beatles' catalog available on Apple's iTunes have "stalled," according to Paul McCartney.

Apparently the impasse is between the band's representatives and record label EMI, McCartney told the Associated Press in London on Monday. EMI, the smallest of the four top recording companies can't close a deal with iTunes or any new music formats without the authorization of the Beatles: McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the estates of the late George Harrison and John Lennon.

McCartney made the comments at an event to kickoff his new album, Electric Arguments, the AP reported.

"The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process," McCartney said. "I really hope it will happen because I think it should."

Apple Corps has long declined to allow Beatles music to be offered over the Web and things looked bleakest after Apple Corps sued Apple over a trademark dispute. The case was resolved last year.

An EMI representative told CNET News late Monday that it hopes to have an agreement soon.

"We have been working very hard to secure an agreement with Apple Corps to make The Beatles' legendary recording catalog available to fans in digital form," An EMI spokesperson. "Unfortunately the various parties involved have so far been unable to reach agreement, but we really hope that everyone can make progress soon."

Google is in the process of paring back a contractor workforce that numbers about 10,000, the company confirmed Monday. The news, though, isn't as fresh as it might appear at first blush.

The contractor cut story made the rounds Monday after publication of a Silicon Valley WebGuild story with the alarming headline of "Google Layoffs - 10,000 Workers Affected." The 10,000 number and Google's efforts to reduce it, though, emerged in October in a San Jose Mercury News story, and it's not clear exactly how many will lose a job.

Google's solar panel-studded headquarters as viewed from the air.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

In that article, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed the 10,000 number and said, "It's really high." According to the story, "He said Google began looking at the number six months ago and has a plan to significantly reduce that number through vendor management, converting some contractors to regular employees, and other approaches."

Google spokeswoman Jane Penner didn't share too many details Monday, such as how many contractors are affected, whether contracts are being canceled or just not renewed, how many contractors Google will hire, and over what time frame the changes will take place.

"We have 10,000, and we have had a plan in place for awhile to significantly reduce that number," she said. "This is something we've been thinking about for awhile--six or seven months. It predates the most acute phase of the (present economic) crisis."

Google has been slowing hiring and reportedly had 20,123 of its own employees at the end of September. The company has been working to increase revenue from YouTube and other properties, and has shut down projects such as the Lively virtual world and SearchMash experimental search site, which "has gone the way of the dinosaur" according to the page.

Layoffs are of course spreading across the world, including at direct Google competitors such as Yahoo, but Google gets more attention than most. For one thing, Google is a high-profile company with lavish benefits such as "20 percent time" in which engineers can work on projects of their own choosing. For another, the company has been relatively bullish about the extent to which its primary source of revenue, search advertising, is recession-proof.

Facebook has been awarded $873 million in damages against a Canadian man accused of sending spam messages to its members.

The default judgment was issued in federal court in San Jose, Calif., on Friday against Adam Guerbuez, of Montreal, and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital. The ruling also forbids Guerbuez from using Facebook or interacting with its members ever again.

Facebook doesn't expect to necessarily collect the money because "it's unlikely that Geurbez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honor the judgment rendered against them," Max Kelly, Facebook's director of security, wrote in a blog posting on Monday. "We are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users."

Neither Guerbuez, who has made money selling videos showing people attacking the homeless in Montreal, nor Atlantis Blue Capital could be reached for comment.

Facebook noticed an uptick in spam beginning in the spring, with Facebook members receiving messages from friends and other members offering things like herbal marijuana and male enhancement pills for sale, a spokesman said. The messages were coming from Facebook accounts that had been compromised.

Facebook sued under the Can-Spam (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, which bans "false and misleading" marketing e-mails. Although the law was written for e-mails, a judgment in favor of MySpace in May set the precedent for extending the law to messages sent within social networks. In that case, MySpace was awarded $234 million to be paid by so-called Spam King Sanford Wallace and another man.

The Facebook award is the largest judgment in history for a case brought under the Can-Spam Act, according to Kelly.

Facebook has beefed up its antispam technology since the spring, creating tools that can delete spam messages from accounts and block URLs that direct people to spam Web sites.

Police in Pembroke Pines, Fla., are trying to determine whether those who goaded a Florida 19-year-old to commit suicide bear any responsibility in his death, according to several reports.

"There is an active investigation," Sgt. John Gazzano of the Pembroke Pines Police Department told CNET News. He did not provide any other details.

Last week, the teenager set up a Webcam to broadcast himself taking an overdose of drugs on Web video service Justin.tv. The 12-hour ordeal was watched by hundreds of people, some who encouraged the young man to do away with himself.

"You want to kill yourself?" said one post to a message left by the teenager saying he intended to kill himself. "Do the world a favor and stop wasting our time with your mindless self pity."

Others attempted to contact police and save the young man.

This is believed to be the first suicide broadcast live to the Web from the United States. In Great Britain, a 42-year-old man hanged himself last year.

FanSnap announced Monday a $5.5 million funding round, which it aims to use on completing the build-out of its search engine.

FanSnap, which launched its ticket search engine beta in September, received funding from existing investor General Catalyst Partners, which led the round.

The FanSnap site is designed to allow users to search for tickets based on a number of criteria, from price range to number of tickets sought, as a well as an at-a-glance ticket price range based on the stadium section using a colored map.

The site gleans its data from 56 ticketing providers including StubHub, Ace Ticket, and TicketNetwork.

Growth projections for online advertising received another knock to the knees on Monday, as analysts continued to lower their outlooks.

The online advertising industry is expected grow 11 percent in the U.S. and 9 percent worldwide next year, down from a previous estimate of 13 percent for both figures, according to a research note by analyst Jeff Lindsay of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

Earlier this the month, Jim Friedland of Cowen & Co. placed a much more dire outlook on the industry, predicting an anemic 3 percent growth in the U.S. next year, down from his previous forecast of 13 percent.

In taking such a bearish position, Friedland mainly pointed to a decline in online display advertising, which he expects will suffer from a high single-digit drop-off in ad budgets.

Indeed. Yahoo, which holds a sizable presence in display advertising, last month posted a 64 percent drop in third-quarter earnings and ordered a round of layoffs.

Paid-search advertising in the U.S. is also expected to feel the pain next year, with that segment predicted to post a six-point decline to growth of 11 percent, Friedland said in his note.

In Friedland's prediction of paid search growing in the low double-digits, as compared with display advertising in the low single-digits, Google would do well, given that it's a dominant player in paid-search ads.

If you thought that watching football in high definition seemed more realistic, just wait until you can view a game in 3D.

Next week the National Football League is broadcasting live in 3D a game between the San Diego Chargers and the Oakland Raiders to theaters in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston. The event, to be held December 4, is a demonstration to show how the technology can be used to provide a more realistic experience in a theater or in the home.

The NFL has invited representatives from consumer electronics companies to view the event in an effort to drum up support. In addition to showing the game on a big 3D screen, the demonstration will include television displays to show what could be possible in people's homes, The Wall Street Journal reported. Some consumer electronics makers have already begun making 3D television sets, mostly to accommodate DVDs that are available in 3D. But the industry is still working on standards for 3D.

Just as live sports entertainment has pushed the adoption of high-definition TVs, it could also help drive standards efforts and adoption of 3D TVs.

Burbank-based 3ality Digital will shoot the game with special 3D cameras and transmit the game via satellite service to the three theaters. Real D 3D is providing the displays in the theaters and is overseeing production and transmission of the 3D broadcast.

This isn't the first time that the NFL has demonstrated 3D technology. In 2004, it filmed the Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers in 3D. Sandy Climan, the CEO of 3ality, told The Wall Street Journal that when he shows the footage from the taped 3D Super Bowl, "people crouch down to catch the ball. It's as if the ball is coming into your arms."

Even though other live events like operas and circuses have been broadcast live in 3D to theaters around the country, the event on December 4 will be the first time that the NFL has broadcast a game live using the technology.