Alt Wire is a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a different guest blogger every weekday. Today's guest is Davy Rothbart, creator and editor of Found magazine and frequent contributor to This American Life. We asked him for five links and he came up with 13. No complaints. 

These days I spend about 87 hours a day on YouTube, usually hopping from found snippets (someone blowing out the candles at their birthday party or singing sadly alone in a car) to 80's rap videos (Nice & Smooth; EPMD) to the kind of classic sports moments that set my nostalgiac streak a-tremblin' (think Elvis Grbac's touchdown pass to Desmond Howard). Whatever emotional buttons you want to press on yourself, with YouTube you're only a couple of clicks away. (I've been having trouble, though, locating a clip of Jeff Van Gundy hanging on for dear life to Alonzo Mourning's leg—any leads appreciated.)

I can still remember my first visit to YouTube way back in 2007: A friend had sent me a link to Stephen Colbert roasting President Bush at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. It was love at first sight—not with Colbert, but with YouTube. Here are five favorites from my favorite web planet:

Creep, Kansas City: This video, to me, represents the magic of the found bits available on YouTube. This is one of the most raw, sad and beautiful videos I can imagine, and I don't think a filmmaker could craft something quite this rich and pure. This girl has a ton of other similar, strangely affecting videos.

Wet Pets: As a longtime fan of local cable commercials, I've seen some dandies (Puffer Reds, anyone?) but this one outshines them all.

V. Count Macula's "Smooth Wizardz": When people ask me what it's like to live in Michigan, I share with them this visionary song and video from Detroit's next legend, V. Count Macula. The best shot's gotta be of Shark wielding the nunchucks while he's on his cellie.

Bakopoulos/Okopski Holiday Card 2008: Novelist/professional bad-ass Dean Bakopoulos sent over my favorite holiday card of 2008.

Baron Davis, It's Time to Come Home: How could B.D. not have been swayed?

Frosting: Another found snippet, this one of a happy family; oddly, I recognize my brother Peter's Poem Adept CD playing in the background. "YouTube, where are you now?"

Gasoline Addiction: Speaking of Peter, when he first moved to Seattle, he was offered lead guitar in this band; apparently, they often play shows on the motocross circuit. I'll never forgive him for turning the opportunity down.

Bio: Davy Rothbart is the creator and editor of Found magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio's This American Life, and author of the story collection "The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas." He's also the subject of an upcoming documentary film, My Heart Is An Idiot. Davy and Peter Rothbart are about to hit the road on a 57-city FOUND Tour; please check local listings.  

EDITOR'S NOTE: We couldn't resist turning Rothbart's post into a YouTube playlist. Here are his picks, make it a lunch-at-your-desk date:

Previous Alt Wire Guests:   Roger White, Dan Sinker, Phil Yu, Matt Novak, Jason Marsh, David LaBounty, Jen Angel, Will Braun, Regan Hofmann, Josh Breitbart, Andrew Lam,  Jessica Valenti, Jessica Hoffmann, Noah Scalin, Rinku Sen, Paddy Johnson, Melissa Mcewan,  Fatemeh Fakhraie , Joe Biel, Anne Elizabeth Moore 

The Vatican recently launched a YouTube channel so that "[the Catholic Church] is not a stranger to those spaces where numerous young people search for answers and meaning in their lives." So far, the channel includes papal press releases and video excerpts of Holy Mass. If you'd like to watch Pope Benedict VXI announce the Vatican's leap into the Internet age, you'll have to follow the link to YouTube; the embedding codes that allow reposting YouTube videos on other websites have been "disabled by request."

The winner of last year’s Tropfest Australia film festival was recently released over YouTube. The film, directed by Michelle Lehman, is funny, well-made, and absolutely compelling. You can watch it below:

(Thanks, Coudal.)

A new form of censorship has quietly crept over the internet. Though governments continue to pursue old-school forms of prior restraint, technology is quickly making the blackened-ink style of censorship obsolete. The new ways to restrict free speech don’t require killing information entirely, governments and private companies simply inconvenience and frustrate people away from information they want to keep under wraps.

The internet was meant to foster communication, and it still creates opportunities for vibrant free speech. At the same time, computer science professor Harry Lewis writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education that the internet’s “rapid and ubiquitous adoption has created a flexible and effective mechanism for thought control.” As people increasingly rely on the internet for their news and information, banishing something from the web means effectively striking it from the public consciousness.

Governments have already begun to influence internet usage inside of their countries to enforce social and political norms. Lewis writes that on the internet, there is already “no sex in Saudi Arabia, no Holocaust denials in Australia, no shocking images of war dead in Germany, no insults to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey.”

China sits at the vanguard of this new form of censorship. The country’s famed “Great Firewall” is one of the most advanced information blocking tools in the world. Every savvy netizen, however, knows of proxy servers, encryption services, and other ways to skirt the firewall and find information that China doesn’t want its citizens to see. “The Great Firewall of China isn't impenetrable, “Jacqui Cheng reported for Ars Technica in 2007, “it just takes a little elbow grease and high Internet traffic to squeeze a few banned terms through.” That requirement of elbow grease constitutes the cornerstone of the new censorship.

Governments don’t have to censor all the information that comes into their country anymore, either. Censorship increasingly relies on one information bottleneck: Google. Jeffrey Rosen wrote for the New York Times that Google and its subsidiaries, including YouTube, “arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet.” Governments and businesses now realize that banning information from Google means effectively censoring it from a massive audience of people, and they are developing strategies accordingly.

“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” technology expert Tim Wu told the New York Times. After the Turkish government successfully lobbied YouTube to take down videos inside of Turkey that were deemed offensive, the Government tried to ban the videos worldwide to protect Turks living outside the country. These videos would all be available on websites other than YouTube, but with one website eclipsing all others for web videos, really, who would know?

In the United States, copyright laws are often invoked to frighten people into censorship. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that the McCain-Palin campaign, an unlikely advocate for internet freedom, claimed that YouTube “silenced political speech” after it took down campaign ads due to copyright violation claims.

YouTube general council Zahavah Levine responded saying, “YouTube does not possess the requisite information about the content in user-uploaded videos to make a determination as to whether a particular takedown notice includes a valid claim of infringement.” Because of that lack of information, the site often takes down videos first and examines the validity of copyright claims later. By the time videos are restored, especially in a fast-moving political campaign setting, the damage has already been done.

The website Chilling Effects documents many of these cease-and-desist letters in an attempt to combat some of the unnecessary censorship. The site was created in partnership with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of universities to help people understand their First Amendment rights and protect legal online speech. But with governments and businesses exchanging and learning from each other’s censorship tactics, the strategies to restrict free speech will likely grow more sophisticated.

Billboard’s top 25 songs of 2008 have been compiled into one mashup by DJ Earworm. The result is synthetic, understandably, but surprisingly well done. 

Here’s the video:

(Thanks, National Review, of all places.)

Take a break from the news stream and the refresh button. The folks at the Landline are out with a second batch of McCain attack ads inspired by famous directors. David Lynch fans are in for a treat.

Watch the first round here.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

We should begin with what is perhaps the best video of the campaign season:

Here are a few cinematic suggestions for John McCain’s next spate of attack ads. As Mother Jones' Riff blog notes, the Wes Anderson take at the end is the best:

And now compare the responses of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin when asked by children what exactly the vice president does. (Hint: One of their answers is accurate.)

Biden's remarks come toward the end, but it's worth watching the whole thing:

Governor Palin, your response?

Twitter isn't the only new website that's changing the party conventions. This week’s gala also has the distinction of being the first Demcoratic National Convention of the YouTube era. Throngs of delegates, protestors, and journalists (professional or otherwise), armed with video cameras, are descending on Denver and swarming the Pepsi Center in hopes of capturing a politician’s gaffe, a protestor’s stunt, or a police officer’s unwarranted action.

The footage is already piling up: There's a Fox News crew accosted by angry protestors, a clash between anti- and pro-abortion rights advocates, and disgruntled protestors being corralled by police (though the inclusion of the word “RIOT” in the clip’s title might be overselling the scuffle). There’s also an interview with Hillary Clinton supporters—not quite as formidable as the media would have us believe—reasoning that their candidate still has a chance of clinching the nomination.

Inside the convention itself, small gatherings and speeches that might get passed over by national networks are being captured by the video sharing site. These include a standout speech by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) at a breakfast meeting. Also inside the walls of the convention center, a video meme is growing in strength as conventioneers shoot “I Nominate Barack Obama Because…” clips at the YouTube booth in the lobby. 

For busy people who missed the live television broadcasts, YouTube is also a good place to find clips from network coverage of the convention, such as Ted Kennedy’s opening-night speech. Though interested viewers should watch these clips now, since they clearly violate copyright laws.

Image courtesy of jonsson, licensed by Creative Commons.

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, click here.

Privacy experts panicked last week when a federal judge ordered Google to turn over sensitive information about its users to Viacom. The New York Times reports that some believe, “the video viewing habits of tens of millions of people could be exposed.” Viacom asked for the information to assist in a $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google’s video sharing site YouTube, but the case is sure to have larger implications than a few illegally posted videos. 

Some privacy advocates have called attention to the inevitable flaws in Google’s system of collecting private data. Writing for Computer World, Jaikumar Vijayan asked, “what is Google doing collecting and retaining all that data in the first place?” According to Vijayan, the company is clearly trying to improve targeted marketing campaigns, but users should be skeptical of any company that keeps such a huge cache of personal information. 

There is one way that Google could get back into the good graces of some privacy advocates. If they’re being forced to turn over all the personal information to Viacom, TechCrunch suggests that Google should simply produce it in dead-tree paper form. The information they’re ordered to turn over is estimated at about 12 terabites—enough to fill up the Library of Congress. Printing it all out wouldn’t be eco-friendly, but it would definitely slow down Viacom’s efforts to parse the info.

UPDATE: What does 12 terabites of data look like? Neatorama breaks it down: 2,615 DVDs or 5 billion single-spaced typewritten pages.

You can always count on Wonkette, the political arm of the Gawker Media Empire, to handle even the weightiest of topics with an irreverence that dances perilously close the line separating good taste from bad, daring readers to take umbrage. In the wake of the announcement that Senator Ted Kennedy has a malignant and inoperable brain tumor, Wonkette presents a relatively restrained post titled “Ted Kennedy Has Lived for Hundreds of Years.” It features a surprisingly classy YouTube photo-retrospective of his life and career, points out that “Even old racist Robert Byrd cried on the Senate floor” in response to the diagnosis, and concludes that “we can say this because it's unrelated to his cancer: Ted Kennedy looked like such a preppy douchebag for most of his life. But he did shit for poor people so it all balances out.”

Enjoy Wonkette’s tribute to the ailing senator.

Think of poetry as dry or inaccessible? First, read Utne editor Julie Hanus’ post on why readers shouldn’t dismiss the field of poetry as a whole. Next, check out poetry set to animation on YouTube; it may change your mind yet. Ad agency JWT-NY has produced videos that feature former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins reading his poems set to delightful animation. Collins’ poems are known for being popular and accessible to begin with, but the added animation is intended to draw people in with even greater ease. I especially enjoyed the eeriness of “Some Days,” embedded below.

(Thanks, The Tyee.)

—Sarah Pumroy

Last week, Jordan’s Queen Rania kicked off an East-West dialogue by posting a video on YouTube called “Send me your stereotypes.” From now through August 12 (International Youth Day), Rania will work to address “some of the common stereotypes that [Westerners] hear about the Arab world,” by responding to video questions submitted on her YouTube channel.

Zeynab at Muslimah Media Watch is both hopeful and skeptical about Rania’s YouTube diplomacy.

My main worry about this project is that it will be an excuse for Islamophobic ranting, with loud voices who aren’t interested in allowing others to refute negative stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. That it won’t be a dialogue, that no one will learn anything. Or that the “truths” presented won’t be accepted because they are not black-and-white, but instead are complex and sticky: for example, explaining that female genital cutting is not an Islamic practice, but one that is tied to local cultures, might not satisfy a poster who thinks this practice and all who engage in it are barbaric.

More than 40 responses have been posted thus far.

—Danielle Maestretti

Sesame Street is perfect, and has been perfect for more than 30 years. I admit here, in print, that I still enjoy the odd episode or two, even though I have that counting-to-10 thing nearly mastered. For the rest of you Sesame Street aficionados in need of a fix to ease the doldrums of a Friday afternoon, you can stop your grouching. Sesame Street is now offering clips from past episodes on its website.

This is just one more example of television studios giving fans ways to watch their content legally online. There are hundreds if not thousands of Sesame Street videos on YouTube, all possibly illegal. But now I can sit and watch Sesame Street on my computer and not break any federal laws. Which is A-OK.

—Brendan Mackie