I’ll be away this week, posting lightly and enjoying the sun…and I’m not saying where. Emails are unlikely to be read for the next 8 days.

The other day I posted a YouTube video of Kevin Rose demo’ing a very early version of Digg, and talked about the importance of capturing the early days of a startup on video. Scrybe is an unlaunced startup doing this now to market the company, but in the future if they are successful we’ll look back and be glad the video exists.

Robert Scoble is now creating high definition videos of many hot young startups for his new show ScobleShow. I just watched the 34 minute video for Bluedot - good stuff. They even announce a minor new product at the end.

I agree with Nick Carr’s assessment of Lessig’s YouTube slam: it smells bad. Lessig uses very poor examples to back up a claim that “ever other major Web 2.0 company does expressly enable true sharing.”. He leaves out the big winners, who mostly have walled gardens around user generated content. And Lessig clearly has an agenda to destroy property rights and rebuild them in his image. That agenda is fine, but his arguments are weak and frankly this was a big fat softball for an eager Nick Carr to hit out of the park. Tim O’Reilly has a well thought out and less personal response to Lessig as well, suggesting that we’re still evolving and that YouTube was a pretty good evolution from the old days.

The market is ultimately going to decide the winners here, not Lessig, Carr or O’Reilly. I’m sure YouTube will look quaint a few years from now, but they offered a compelling product at the right time.

Marshall wrote a post about MyBlogLog this evening over at TechCrunch. Many bloggers will find the service compelling because it shows you recent visitors to your blog, and if someone visits your blog a certain number of times (default is 10 times), they become “admirers,” which is sort of like being added as a friend in a social network. I spent quite a bit of time browsing through various blogs, seeing who was reading what.

They track users via a cookie and when you visit a blog that is in the mybloglog system, it notes it. That’s where my concern arises.

Lots of sites add cookies to visitors for one reason or another, and certainly lots of questionable things are done with the data collected. But far fewer sites that cookie me also get me to voluntarily give away personal information (and mybloglog requests a lot of information, although almost none of it is required for registration). And as far as I know, NONE of those sites publish data collected by the cookie to a publicly available web page along with my personal information.

But MyBlogLog does. And I’m not sure I like that.

Their privacy policy is pretty clear on the fact that they do this - “It places your profile picture on the faces of certain of the sites you read. Site-by-site control of where your profile picture appears will be provided, but is not available yet.” And they also provide a link to opt-out of having data collected about what sites you visit (link is in the privacy policy).

I also emailed with Scott Rafer, one of the founders, this evening about this issue. He says “it appears less likely that we’ll ever actually get into the data sales business. There’s too many other opportunities that are less controversial. We’ll certainly never sell any personal data or individual clickstreams whatsoever.”

I’m glad to hear that, and I trust Scott to do the right thing. Still, I turned off the data collection and display feature for my account at MyBlogLog. I guess I haven’t gotten so used to the notion that all of our privacy is already dead that I am comfortable seeing my name and sites I’ve visited on a publicly available website.

So for now I am enjoying seeing what sites everyone else is visiting (and I love the fact that this person is a TechCrunch reader), but I’m not going to give away the sites that I visit just yet.

It’s a good day when I see a company get the attention it deserves after we write about them on TechCrunch. Congrats to ProtectMyPhotos.

It’s sort of odd to read about a TechCrunch Network party that I didn’t actually attend, but in any event CrunchGear’s first mixer was a success, with about 100 people attending and three sponsors: SoonR, Blast Media and Marketing Begins At Home.

I’m frankly stunned at the early success of CrunchGear. With twenty-something thousand RSS subscribers it is already 1/5 the size of TechCrunch. Congrats to John Biggs and his team for all of the hard work. Nicely done.

This whole “widgets” thing seems to be important - so the timing of Om & Niall’s conference on the topic couldn’t be better.

The event is on November 6 in San Francisco, and tickets are only $100. This will sell out very soon, so buy your ticket now if you want to attend.