Blog: A week after editor announced his resignation, he's back; executive who reportedly pressured him to kill stories critical of advertisers will return to previous post.

An article in BusinessWeek goes over how hard it is for people to make money using YouTube and other video-sharing sites. It's got a weird tone, as if it's some great tragedy that vloggers have a hard time earning a living from making web videos, and even carries a whiff of the implication that YouTube and its ilk are exploiting these hard-working digerati. The piece goes through some of the revenue-sharing plans from YouTube, Revver and other sites, and says that many vloggers and video producers would rather run everything through their own site so they can grab all the revenues. But this exploitation angle largely ignores the benefits that using a video-sharing site brings. It notes the aggregation aspect, as well as their ability to get large ad deals, but it ignores the most obvious benefit: they pay the bandwidth bill. By using something like YouTube, producers don't have to pay to host and serve their videos, while the various platforms also allow videos to be more easily shared and embedded in web pages, something that helps them become more popular. While the biggest video producers might be able to make more money by trying to hang on to their own traffic, directly selling their own ads and paying for their own bandwidth, it's rather unlikely that most of them will be able to thrive on their own. Furthermore, perhaps they're missing the point by focusing so much on ads, rather than by viewing their videos as promotional materials (with the ability to generate some ad revenues on the side) for other paid products or services.

All for one

JavaOne Oracle has played up its open source credentials with technologies to simplify Java development. It is also making ommunity donations to advance its middleware and tools for online services.

If you have teenage boys and are unsure about what topics to cover when discussing "the birds and bees" with them, it may be worth reading the latest piece of research about sexual communication and teenage boys. The study shows that parental communication focuses on the negative aspects of sex compared to the rather more positive sexual messages teenage boys receive from the media and peers.

Scientists examining documents dating back 3,500 years say they have found proof that the origins of modern medicine lie in ancient Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks.

New research confirms the "Out Of Africa" hypothesis that all modern humans stem from a single group of Homo sapiens who emigrated from Africa 2,000 generations ago and spread throughout Eurasia over thousands of years. These settlers replaced other early humans (such as Neanderthals), rather than interbreeding with them.

Teenagers who watch television for three or more hours per day may have a higher risk of attention and learning difficulties in their adolescent and early adult years, according to new research.