On google video people can browse the “top 100″ of the most viewed videos, divided by country. In the Italian top 100, the most viewed video is a documentary that was transmitted by BBC in October 2006. The title is “Sex Crimes and Vatican” and is about priest and sexual abuse.

I’m not a lawyer, but the Vatican here says that the sexual assault of priests to minors under 18 years old should be reported to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and that, for these kinds of crimes, there exists what’s known as the pontifical secret. The document is dated May 18, 2001 and signed by Josephus Cardinal Ratzinger.

Ratzinger was named as a defendant in a civil lawsuit: he was accused of conspiring with the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston to cover up some abuse in the district court of Harris County, Houston, Texas (in mid ‘90). The Pope is considered a head of state and automatically has diplomatic immunity. (more here, here and here)

Ok, maybe 38 minutes is a lot, but instead of watching TV this evening, let’s surf here.

Here is the BBC page on the documentary.

Photo credit: Franz

Update: The video is now split into four parts: one, two, three, four.

Photos: here. Videos: Critical Mass, Massers, Bicycle Accident, Golden Gate Park Cork e Tunnel Adrenaline

In the last 15 years, on the last Friday of the month, San Francisco’s bicyclists meet up to demonstrate that cities can be for bicycles, too.

The event is called Critical Mass. The main idea is easy: meet up as a group and go around in the city. But when the cyclists are 4000 or more and they ride all together, there is the chaos: a critical mass that blocks the city. The critical mass movement has no leaders. At each corner in the ride, the group decides where to go. Everything seems to be casual.

Media coverage is intense: six television trucks, five helicopters, an airplane and a fixed television cameramen at the start.

I’ve seen every type of bicycle, I think (A bird, a bmw bike, a rickshaw, bikes that can be ridden lying, an old bicycle ridden by the world famous soccer player Zola, High bicycles and double bicycles). A lot of people wear strange costumes or hats like this hammer hat and this petroleum field hat. The cops were riding, too. I made a video with a patchwork of massers: video

If you ask the massers why they are causing all this traffic, they just say: “We do not cause traffic, we are traffic”. The base idea is to go around the city riding a bike. But what can they do with red signal lights? The way they developed is what they call corking. Only the head of the big mass halts on red lights, then some massers block the intersection, staying in front of the cars. Other massers give change to the corkers, until every bike in the group is passed. Some people were asking the police to stop the corking of the massers, but most of them are happy with the massers. Sometimes a driver will start to become afraid and will start to honk their horn. If it happens, all the riders start to laugh and scream.

Sometimes, all the massers stop in an intersection. Yesterday, it was two times. The first was at an intersection with an highway. The second was when the riders met a motorcycle group. There began to develop a little tension then, because the motorcyclists started to burn their tires on the road. Then, each biker went down and started to lift the bicycles up, often with much screaming. Here is the movie.

The whole event was 4 hours long: We started at 6 p.m. from Embarcadero heading to Fisherman’s Wharf along North Beach. Then we headed to downtown and then to Golden Gate Park and finally back in the Haight neighborhood. Then two or three laps around Union Square, screaming like Indians in battlecry. At the end, we were still along Market Street heading toward Mission, where we ended tired on the grass of Dolores Park. At the end, it was 9:30 p.m.. We had ridden 20 miles. Video.

When the world famous San Francisco’s slopes descend, it is very fear-provoking. Everyone goes down very fast, screaming. You think that if one cyclist crashes, then everyone can go over the top of him. At first, I started to film the descent, but at the first down slope, I had an accident. Here is the movie of the accident. I hurt my right elbow and my left leg. My jeans were torn (I’ll not send the photos of injury). At that point I decided to put two hands on the bicycle and put away the camera, but at night there was a great descending tunnel. I filmed it here.

It’s great to think that the massers say that they want a city better for bicycling. If you hear it and you come from the metropolitan Roman Jungle, you want to laugh. By the way, next big critical mass is the 25, 26 and 27 of May: The Rome interplanetary Critical Mass.

Today was the last Web 2.0 Expo day, but everyone in the world is writing about this. I prefer to write about what I’ve seen at the Creative Commons Salon SF made up by the Creative Commons guys.

Jay Dedman opened the evening presenting the new SpinXpress.com’s “Get Media” feature. With this you can find the Creative Commons object to use in your videos. Jay is a CNN International veteran who now plays with Vlogging (Video Blogging).

Following Jay, Liz Dunn with Technorati presented Where’s The Fire: a system that brings the most important news of the blogosphere to the attention of the user. News is selected by means of a continuous poll by the users: something like a Technorati internal digg. I’ve also known that for years, everything produced by Technorati is released under a Creative Commons license.

Have you never searched for some data online? If you’ve never tried it, you don’t know that you can never find anything. A lot of sites write, comment, and play with data, but not bare bone data. Sometimes bare bone data are more explicative of 1000 words, but you cannot find them on the Internet. A good answer to this problem comes from Brian Mulloy, Dimitry Dimov and Sara Wood with swivel.com: a 2.0 start-up company focused on data: bare bone data.

Seth Mazow works with Interplast: a medical doctors’ association that works in the third world (foto); something like the doctors without borders of plastic surgery. Seth has announced that the movie “A Story of Healing”, Oscar awarded in1998 as Best Documentary, is now released with a Creative Commons License. Seth illustrated that the earning curve naturally sloped down year by year. So, ten years after the start, they decided to release it under a Creative Commons License. Now it is the first CC licensed movie to be awarded by the Academy in the story. I’ve seen the documentary and it is really a must-see. Click here to see it. Take a look, copy it and share it with your friend: Creative Commons Licenses rocks.

The evening presenter was the Creative Commonist Jon Phillips already met by me with Jay Dedman at the Super Happy Vlog House.

Here are the Foto and video.

Still events 2.0 waiting the big one: Web 2.0 Expo 2007 that starts Sunday.

Wednesday I went to the Google Campus to attend a Usability 2.0 conference. Today it seems that if you don’t call something “2.0″ , then you are a nerd. There I heard Sean Kane with Netflix, Jon Wiley with Google and Luke Wroblewski with Yahoo. A lot of the guilty came from each part of the Silicon Valley. One asked me if I was coming from Rome just for this event. Politely I said that it would be a little too much. Here are the event photos (a nice one is the sushi on surf).

Thursday night at Crossroad Cafe’ there was the Sflickr meeting: the meeting of the San Francisco’s Flickr users. At a photographer meeting, one should take photos, but I thought that a lot of photos would have to be taken and that a video was more original.

My jacket without sleeves let people think that Iwas a real “pro” photographer, but when they saw my photo machine everything became more amateur.

I captured the video from my screen, using Beryl on linux. Roll the cube is really funny.

The soundtrack is from Silvio’s and Stefano’s group and is titled MKM1 (don’t ask me why).

Enjoy the view (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUiRHARXGJ0).