The Boycott

There are several classes of Boycotts, but I think that I may be the only person to boycott coke because they played and played a real crappy song in the radio some years back. I only ended that boycott when coke launched the Final Fantasy IX ad. This happened quite a few years back, but it serves as a perfect introduction for a boycott I started a few days ago.

I had been writing about the need to have an open codec associated with the new VIDEO tag present in HTML5. I had linked the petition to get youtube to support ogg/theora along with a second link that I later removed, a link to the same kind of petition for VIMEO

I had read the beginning of that forum message, and I was linking a lot both what it said and the respectful reaction of the community. But I hadn't read it till the end because it was long and I was writing a blog post. After publishing the post, I went over and finished reading, and at the bottom, I found a message from Andrew Pile, part of the Vimeo Staff. He wrote "Going to close this now since "+1" reposted a hundred times doesn't really help other than to clog up the front page. We fully support Ogg/Theora as an upload format. As for playback, the likeliness of that happening is close to zero at the moment."

Once I've read that, I took out the link from the blog post, in part because the voting was already cancelled. But another big part of that had to do with the attitude. For Vimeo, hundreds of people manifesting their accord with the original poster (that's the meaning of +1, an approval vote) don't serve any purpose at all but to clog up the front page. For them, hundreds of users manifesting themselves to the point where that appearing in the front page constantly is something that gives up a bad image, it doesn't matter that they are not doing anything destructive, that they are only trying to tell Vimeo the road they want it to follow.

After thinking it seriously for some hours, I sent an email to Vimeo. It says "I've seen that although you support Ogg/Theora as an upload format, you don't support it as playback format, as Andrew Pile said it, "As for playback, the likeliness of that happening is close to zero at the moment.".

Allright then, you have every right to do so, but the likeness of me entering your site to watch videos till you change this is close to zero at the moment. I know that I'm only one user, but I know I won't be alone in this.

Good luck and please fix it soon, I'd love to have a reason to return. "

So now you know, this is a boycott, and everyone that want to jump aboard will be welcomed.