My friend Julia Lalla-Maharaj made the shortlist today in the YouTube Davos competition with her campaign to end FGM – female genital mutilation.  The winning campaign will get to put their issue in front of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

If you have a moment to spare and you think that female genital mutilation -  the removal of little girls’ genitals to turn them into commodities traded by men – is unacceptable, please watch the video and then vote for Julia on the YouTube Davos channel.

Thank you in advance!

A couple of weeks ago some friends came by and we found ourselves creating a soundtrack to the evening via YouTube.  You know how it goes; guitar out, dancing in the front room to a whole load of old tunes you could never admit to liking in everyday life.

For many people, YouTube is more a place to go for music than it is for moving image.  You can be sure – legal issues aside – that someone somewhere has uploaded your favourite music.  The only downside is the interface; a masterpiece of MySpace style chaos.

Then along comes TubeRadio.fm.  Think YouTube meets iTunes meets Spotify and you’re close.

Unless I’m sorely mistaken (and I rarely am) the TubeRadio.fm web interface is so entirely intuitive that you don’t even need to read the f****n manual.  How refreshing. You just start using it – and, providing there’s no unforeseen catch – you keep on using it.

I’ve no idea whether TubeRadio.fm is the future of music video listening but right here, right now, it’s most definitely the present.

Get over there yourself and try it out.  You won’t be disappointed.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

I’ve seen this a few times in lo-res quality. Here it is at its best. Awesome. Leaves me wondering if the skis are biodegradable though..?

Now I’m not hugely technical but what I notice is that Viddler videos don’t show on the iPhone whereas YouTube ones do.

Something to do with one using Flash and the other not? Hey – I don’t know. What I do know is the difference this will make to the average punter.

Trying to view a Viddler video on the iPhone results in a message telling you your browser doesn’t have Flash installed.

The problem is that your iPhone browser is just that – an iPhone version of Safari.  You can’t install regular Flash player for it.

At this point most people will give up or worse, get sucked into the endless FAQ hell of the ‘why doesn’t iPhone work with Flash’ debate.

Looks like I’ll be recommending to clients that they take the YouTube fork in the road. Add to that the fact that YouTube is now the second most widely-used search engine and it starts to look like a no-brainer.