YouTube, the immensely popular video website, where anyone can upload pretty much anything they want, unless it’s unacceptable material (this seems somewhat subjective though), is in hot water with Thailand over a video mocking one of their leaders.  Wow, it’s a good thing the US doesn’t work like that.  Talk about opressive.  Thank God for free speech.

To boot, officials over in Thailand blocked YouTube until they could be promised by the still in it’s youth video company that could come up with a technology to edit out any individually offensive videos.  I’d say that’s an awfully tall order, but I’m sure it’s one the video company is thinking of doing just to appease a huge audience. 

Can you believe that insulting the monarchy in Thailand is considered a criminal act, and is prosecutable?  Google, who owns YouTube apparently exercised it’s US rights of anti-censorship and refused to remove the video clip (good for them). 

I still wonder how YouTube makes it’s money.  I mean, I know they were bought out by Google, and Google has some serious geniuses that can figure out how to make money in advertising in almost any medium, but how many ads are really served and clicked on YouTube? 

Maybe it’s a lot more than I can imagine, but I just think that for such a huge engine of public interest that gets millions of hits a day, it would be able to be exploited for profit a little more than it currently is.  But much kudos to YouTube.  They’ve taken a concept and revolutionized it, and the name in itself is pure genius, I think!