This week over 13 million people watched the ‘Homeless Man with the Golden Voice’, the viral video that changed Ted Williams’ life. The video featured homeless Ted, panhandling on the street offering his voice skills for money, and sharing a sample of his golden announcer voice for a dollar with Doral Chenoweth, a videographer for The Columbus Dispatch website. Chenoweth uploaded the video to YouTube in order to share Williams’ skills with the world and hopefully catch him a break. 13 million YouTube views later he did, but if you want to see the original video now you’ll have to do it on The Dispatch website because the YouTube has removed the video due to a copyright claim.
What? YouTube removed the video that changed this man’s life from YouTube due to a copyright claim? Sounds ridiculous, right? And what’s even more ridiculous is that that claim came from The Columbus Dispatch themselves—the online news outlet that got so much coverage and good karma because of this whole thing!
Ted Williams fans are in a tizzy over the fact that the video has been taken down. A comment on a related video expressed disgust at the copyright claim, telling viewers about how the original video had been taken down. It amassed 390 views in the first hour alone.
I, for one, hope that The Dispatch had a mighty good reason for asking YouTube to remove the video with 13 million plus views. As of yet there has been no comment on the reason. If you go to The Dispatch website you’ll find a page dedicated to Ted Williams, “The Man with the Golden Voice”, which includes links to Dispatch coverage as well as the original video itself, now with the Dispatch logo at the beginning.
I think the Dispatch is doing nothing except making themselves look bad by having the video removed from YouTube. After all, the original clip gave credit to the Dispatch in the description and was even shot and uploaded by a videographer from the Dispatch itself, so it’s not like it was stolen, uncredited material.
But even if the video had been uncredited I’d say this is a little bit of a special case. This is a video that changed a man’s life– a video that is pretty special to him, as well as a lot of other people who saw with this video that there is hope for all of us to turn our lives around. Why did The Dispatch think it would be a good idea to simply wipe the clip from the face of YouTube, especially after so many people blogged about it, Tweeted about it, and posted the link on Facebook.
It sickens me that some people can’t think about anything besides views and revenue. This was a special case in which some of their footage was uploaded to YouTube in order to do a great service to a man on the street. It worked, which is amazing, and all the Dispatch could do was think about how it was theirs and they didn’t want it to be on YouTube on someone else’s account? Like I said, they better have had a mighty good reason for their copyright claim.
Do you think it was a good move on their part to have the video taken down?
So Christmas has been and gone. Are you now facing the New Year and wondering how you can keep up the Christmas spirit and goodwill for the coming year? Well, it certainly helps when you know how to do so for free from your own home.
There are so many simple ways to volunteer or donate to charity by giving up a small amount of your time or re-purposing some money you would normally have spent. So here’s a list of five of the best quick and easy ways to volunteer or donate to charity. Bookmark the list of charities and use it to do the rounds weekly!
Skip1.org
This is a great concept — it’s a site which makes you think about how much money you waste on frivolous things. You nominate something which you will give up, say a lunch or newspapers for a month. Then you donate that same amount of money to feeding a hungry child.
Yes, you’re handing over money to charity, but it’s money you would have spent anyway. It’s also easy to share news of your donation with your friends via social networks, and hopefully convince a few of them to skip something for charity too.
Free Rice
Free Rice has been around a while, but it’s so good it’s worth making sure it’s on this list. Play a simple, addictive trivia quiz and Free Rice will donate rice for each of your correct answers. This is a free and simple way to give whenever you have a free moment. Read more on FreeRice here.
Causes
There are a number of things you can do using Causes, including raising awareness for your chosen charity and helping to raise funds for them. By far the easiest way to donate money with Causes is to set up a birthday or holiday fund. This way, instead of receiving presents from friends and family, you simply ask them to donate the money on your behalf. It takes about two minutes to set up, since you can log in with Facebook Connect – just choose the charity and you’re set!
Charity Gifts
Here’s another easy way to spend your money on charity instead of something you were already going to pay for. Instead of giving gifts to your friends, give them the knowledge that you have donated to charity on their behalf. The Donation4Charity website searches all the big charity gifting sites (such as UNICEF, WWF and Oxfam) and lets you search the gifts according to how much money you have available to spend. Buy a goat for charity for about the same price as a modest gift!
Sparked
Spend 5-10 minutes donating your expertise to charity: Give website feedback, brainstorm fundraising ideas or help design an awareness campaign. This is what they need help with – if you can spend a few minutes working on it then you’ve made a difference to a real charity with just a moment of your time. Read more on Sparked here & get going!
And many, many more!
There are so many great ways to donate your time to charity — the sites listed above are just a few. Here’s some more great articles which introduce many more you might like to try.
- Introducing Jumo – The Social Network for Social Good
- How To Easily Coordinate Volunteers Using Volunteer Spot
- 5 Crowd Funding Websites To Support Your Favourite Charities, Bands & Projects
- Find Volunteering Opportunities Near You with VolunteerMatch
- 10 Search Engines To Help The Environment
- 5 Cool Edutainment Games You Can Play and Also Donate To Charitable Causes
- 5 Websites To Lend A Hand & Make A Difference To The World
What are your favourite sites for donating your time to charity? Do you appreciate charity gifts given on your behalf? Let us know in the comments!
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