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iePlexus Social Media News Brief: March 26, 2010

YouTube goes down, is it China’s fault?  Then, Light out! One major campaign taking place this weekend has been spread almost entirely through social media, we’ll tell you about it.  And why a video of President Bush & President Clinton has gone viral and the controversy surrounding it.  Check out iePlexus’ Social Media News Brief for all the stories making headlines.

YouTube experienced an outage Thursday morning and Google, the parent company of YouTube, said it was all a technical issue and had nothing to do with an outside source. A YouTube insider has said the outage was not a result of any kind of attack or related in any way to Google’s recent move to stop censoring results in China. The timing comes just days after Google’s announcement, which started the speculation online. During the time YouTube was down, Internet users were still able to access individual videos, but YouTube’s main page returned a ‘Service Unavailable’ message. The insider said that Google’s default policy to not discuss the details on the cause of outages.  Meanwhile, nothing new to report to you this Friday on the battle between Google & China other than the Chinese government has banned media outlets in China from covering saga any further.  A note with guidelines on how the media should be run was sent out to agencies across the country.  You may recall that many speculated that the search engine giant was going to pull out of the country entirely this week, but instead they moved their headquarters from Beijing to Hong Kong where laws are less strict.

Hundreds of millions of people are expected to turn off their lights tomorrow night to bring awareness for climate change in the third annual Earth Hour.  A group of New Zealander’s started the event a few years ago and has since gained international attention.  The World Wildlife Foundation is sponsoring the event here in the US.  The Space Needle in Seattle, The Willis or Sears Tower in Chicago, The Empire State Building in New York City, The Eiffel Tower in Paris & The Great Wall of China are all expected to turn off their lights this year along with thousands of other landmarks from around the globe.  The foundation has been promoting the event almost exclusively on Facebook & Twitter, and has been slowing making it to the trending topics mark.  You are encouraged to sign up yourself on EarthHour.org and you can follow the movement on Twitter at @EarthHourUS.  The event is Saturday night at 8:30pm local time.

And finally, today’s viral video is footage shot in Haiti from the BBC.  Camera crews were there when President Bush & President Clinton arrived in country after the earthquake and the two were being greeted by Haitians.  After shaking a civilian’s hand, it looks like President Bush there wipes his hand off on President Clinton’s shirt.  The video hit the web hard this week.  Bush supporters say he likes to stay on time and was just giving President Clinton a ‘lets move a little faster to stay on time’ nudge. 

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