The rumors swirling around the web for last several days were correct. Today it was announced that Google was buying YouTube for a whopping 1.65 BILLION DOLLARS.

What does it mean to bloggers? Google Video and YouTube have equipped bloggers with the ability to embed videos without the need of software downloads, bandwidth, etc. I believe this recent buy by Google will end up being a good thing. Google has a history of empowering bloggers (Adsense, Adwords, blogger, etc.) It appears that they are willing to continue to offer a great medium for users. Google will continue to montetize and will profit from the medium.
What does it mean to surfers? More and more videos for free.

So what is the catch? The same catch that always rears its ugly head with every internet advancement, copyright regulations. The Media masters of yesterday are trying to control the internet like they did the radio and TV. It will not work. The great sites of today are great not because of back room discussions of a few rich men but because of millions of independent users. We do not use Google or any search engines to find the websites of huge corporations but all those other independently created sites that fill our distinct interests.

The internet is a freedom-based product. Free information exchange. It is a medium that will continue to empower its users as long as major corporations and the government do not strip it away from us. We will not allow that to happen.

Related article -

Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion

I have been the webmaster of the United Christian Church website for about a year. It is the site of the local church that I pastor, plus, it is the site of the United Christian Church and Ministerial Association. UCCMA is a Christian Pentecostal fellowship that has 20,000 licensed and ordained ministers. According to our 1and1 stats, we received 11,776 unique visits in August 2006. I saw this as great potential to leave the static website approach of frontpage and instead build an online community using the open-source (free) drupal content management system.

The new site should go live in the next week. This is the second site that I have built using Drupal.

After the installation of Drupal and all the various modules needed to meet our specific needs, uploading content is easy. It also gives me the ability to enable users to post directly to the site. Making it very easy for out users to get new articles uploaded. (With frontpage, I would have articles emailed to have posted on the site. That gets old fast.)

The capabilities of Drupal seem endless.

I am sure I will post more about Drupal as I go.

After much thought and study, I have decided to revamp AntonBurnette.com and put it to good use. I looked into Blogspot, 1and1 blog, Joomla, and Drupal. Although I like Drupal, I have decided to use Wordpress. It seems to be the best way to set up a blog.

I hope you enjoy as this blog grows.