viacom aint all bad - perhaps i love viacom?

I've been a bit quiet recently, having been travelling to institutions around the UK, and then vacationing a bit. But i was pleased to see the news on the row between YouTube and Viacom. Thankfully they have agreed to let Google anonymise the usage histories that will be sent to Viacom as part of the ongoing copyright legal battle.

This only leads me to think that Viacom has created an even more perfect dataset for us to run user analysis over, like the longditudinal study we recently presented at JCDL2008 this year. I assume each user will get an anonymous ID, so that anonymous individual activity can be followed?

Can we have it after you Viacom? We'd love you!

best search dataset ever?

In a current lawsuit between Google's YouTube and Viacom, Google have been instructed to hand over their logs of user viewing habits. Google are upset about it, but at least the judge overruled the request for Google to hand over their source code for filtering copyrighted material! Google have requested, although its not been confirmed yet I believe, that they get to anonymise the logs first, to respect the users' privacy. i personally hope this is allowed.

Anyway, despite this interesting privacy issue, i can't help but thinking that 12 terabytes of usage logs from youtube would be an AMAZING research resource for investigating user behaviour. Sadly they dont have facets to chat about, but it could tell us how people have used query refinements, spelling corrections, categories, filters, similar clips, recommended clips and so much more!

Google might as well do something useful with it, if the data is going to shown to at least one third party.