For those keeping track at home, that kind of revenue growth is pretty fantastic, but not terribly surprising. After all, YouTube serves more than 2 billion videos a day, including more than 100 million a day on mobile devices. And the site has very aggressively ramped up advertising over the past year, placing more ads against partner videos and those that run on mobile devices.

Pichette didn’t state revenue numbers, but doubling growth is not totally out of line with previous analyst projections. Barclay’s Capital analyst Doug Anmuth estimated that YouTube pulled in $450 million in revenues during 2009. While Anmuth’s forecast last January called for 55 percent growth, others were less conservative. Last March, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimated that YouTube would generate nearly $1 billion in sales for the full year.

While doubling revenue is a plus, it’s important to note that Pichette said nothing about YouTube’s profitability. The question of when the online video site would finally turn a profit has been much debated over the past several years. Despite forecasts early last year that YouTube could become profitable in 2010, it seems that the unit — which Google paid $1.65 billion for back in 2006 — still isn’t in the black.

Coincidentally, the Google call was hosted on YouTube and suffered from some pretty dramatic stuttering and lag, which is surprising in part because it was audio-only.

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Ezarik’s initial rise to viral fame in 2007 came when she filmed her iPhone bill; the self-professed Apple addict’s subsequent video work with gadgets was what got the attention of GTTV producer Joel Goodling. Ezarik has already filmed several segments for the show while at CES earlier this month, taking two days there to work for GTTV and then two days to produce material for her independent web presence.

Working there with the GTTV producers taught her a lot. “There were little random things I would do that the producers would notice, like, ‘Justine, you say awesome way too much!’” she said via phone.

Ezarik is committed to GTTV through the end of the year, but it’s not a full-time gig for her, as she believes that the team “will able to shoot a lot of it over the course of a few days,” leaving her time to continue working on YouTube.

As of right now there are no plans for Ezarik’s GTTV work to cross over to her YouTube channel, but Ezarik doesn’t think the two sides will stay completely separate, due to the overlap in her interests and the show’s. And she’ll be discussing her work on GTTV across all elements of her social media presence, including her Facebook page (over 430,000 followers) and Twitter (1.2 million followers). That may not even be written into her contract with GTTV (something she has done in the past with other deals); she’s just excited about the project.

The biggest change for Ezarik, ultimately, is that while her audience on YouTube is largely young women, GTTV is much more guy-oriented. However, while Ezarik acknowledged that the two demographics were very different, she didn’t see it affecting her performance style. “I’m still being myself and doing what I normally do,” she said.

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Silicon Valley startup Law Pivot announced new funding and a new recommendation feature for its Quora-like Q&A service that aims to democratize access to quality legal advice. According to Nitin Gupta, Law Pivot co-founder and VP of business development, the new recommendation feature will add value to the service by helping companies target their queries to lawyers that best match their needs. Even before today’s news, though, Law Pivot has defied the odds by gaining traction in a notoriously technology-resistant profession.

Law Pivot targets technology startups without large legal budgets by letting them pose questions via the web service, which are then answered by Law Pivot’s stable of qualified lawyers. It all sounds great, although Gupta himself — a former lawyer — acknowledges that the legal industry is typically among the last to adopt new technologies. An ongoing shift away from the traditional billable-hours model was accelerated by the economic downturn, however, and now Gupta says “[L]aw firms are realizing that they have to change their ways.”

According to Gupta, Law Pivot has attracted participation from many skilled attorneys, including senior partners at large firms. He attributes the interest to the fact that Law Pivot allows lawyers to expose themselves to new clients more efficiently, as opposed to traditional methods such as attending networking events or doing speaking engagements. Many lawyers have begun to drum up new business by answering questions on Quora and LinkedIn, he says, but Law Pivot gives them the opportunity to do so in a confidential, controlled manner. And when Law Pivot ultimately starts charging for the service, the attorneys will get paid, too.

In this case, what’s good for lawyers is also good for startups. Customers, which include Ooyala and TweetSwirl, can get multiple answers to their questions for a fraction of the price it normally would cost and can establish long-term relationships with an attorney without the legwork normally associated with finding legal counsel.

I asked Gupta about a handful of ethical considerations — including conflict of interest and malpractice liability — that could negatively affect the quality of Law Pivot’s service, but he didn’t seem too concerned. He explained that attorneys understand the rules around concerns, and know that they need to take the appropriate steps to mitigate them, just like they would with in-person client consultations. Another issue that could arise revolves around payment for attorneys, as it’s possible they won’t prioritize Law Pivot questions when more-pressing or higher-paying work awaits with actual clients. For now, though, Gupta says everybody seems happy with the arrangement.

In addition to the recommendation features, Law Pivot announced $200,000 in additional funding, bringing its total to $600,000. The new money comes from Google Ventures and a handful of angel investors.

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We asked Hulu about the survey, and a spokesperson told us it’s part of its ad tailoring personalization feature. She added that it isn’t part of a bigger survey, and that Hulu won’t be releasing the results.

So it’s all just about delivering better ads. Or is it? One could imagine that Hulu could try to pacify its corporate overlords as well as various other rights holders with this survey. The site is owned in part by News Corp., NBC Universal (soon controlled by Comcast) and Disney, all of which are quite concerned about cord cutting.

In addition, rights holders have voiced concerns in the past that catchup services like Hulu could negatively affect the ratings of their prime time assets. Hulu’s life would surely a lot easier if it could tell all of these companies that the vast majority of its users still pay for and watch linear TV at home.

Are you using Hulu to cut the cord? Maybe you’ve even seen the same survey? Let us know in the comments. Want to know if Hulu Plus is a good replacement for cable? The check out the following episode of our weekly web series Cord Cutters:

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New York City has launched an ambitious internal “crowdsourcing” project, aimed at getting ideas from city employees to help the giant metropolis function more efficiently. The program, called Simplicity, is being powered by Spigit, which makes a Software-as-a-Service platform that companies and governments can use to crowdsource ideas. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the plan during his annual “State of The City” address on Wednesday afternoon, and the company said that it will initially be rolled out to 15,000 city workers before being extended to the city’s entire workforce of more than 300,000.

Spigit provides a software platform that allows a company or government to set up an idea-submission site relatively quickly, and incorporates reward-based incentives, idea voting and trading, as well as providing analytics that can help anyone using the software to track submissions and those who provide them. A number of companies, including AT&T and Southwest Airlines, have used its software to get ideas from their employees. Other companies such as Dell — which was one of the first to launch a crowdsourcing effort called IdeaStorm in 2007 — and Starbucks, which launched a similar effort not long afterwards, have used the Salesforce.com platform to get ideas from both inside and outside the company, while Jive Software and BrightIdea also offer similar platforms.

Spigit said that the Simplicity platform has been in beta testing with a small group of NYC employees, and some of the ideas that have been suggested include:

• A central research and development unit that can help NYC agencies find more information about new programs and initiatives.
• A web-based portal that would allow city agencies to bid on items that have been “relinquished” or made redundant by other city agencies.
• A “just in time” inventory-management system that would prevent the over-stocking of supplies.
• A way to identify internal experts who could train other employees at their desks in computer hardware and software, rather than sending employees for training.
• A web-based help desk for employees, so that they could contact someone in another department about a particular topic within their expertise.

Whether the Spigit-powered program will actually help New York become more efficient remains to be seen. It could become just another dumping ground for ideas that never see the light of day — something collaboration experts call the “suggestion box problem.” But at least the city government is trying to use social tools to improve the way it functions, which is an encouraging sign.

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Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Celine

So what’s the problem? Well, it’s not particularly because of the way it looks (it doesn’t appear particularly offensive), or what it’s replacing (it is new). This time, people are angry simply because it exists.

More accurately, protesters say that it doesn’t tell the truth, because the single “HTML5” brand slaps a single, inaccurate name on top of a vast number of technologies and standards for no particular reason. It not only incorporates actual HTML5, the next generation of the language that underpins the web, but also including CSS3, JavaScript, SVG and a plethora of official APIs that can be used for web applications.

In the W3C’s FAQs, this deliberate confusion is outlined: The logo is a general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.

It’s as if the government suddenly announced that from today, all vegetables will be called potatoes, just because some vegetables are potatoes.

Jeremy Keith, a partner at UK-based web design outfit Clearleft, has so far been the point man for the anti-logo campaign. Keith, who is a friend of mine, wonders what the point is in having a bucket term that makes life more difficult for those working on the web.

What do I do when I want to give a description of a workshop, or a talk, or a book that’s actually about HTML5? If I just say “It’s about HTML5,” that will soon be as meaningful as saying “It’s about Web 2.0,” or “It’s about leveraging the synergies of disruptive transmedia paradigms.” The term HTML5 has, with the support of the W3C, been pushed into the linguistic sewer of buzzwordland.

Amid the protests, the W3C is, in fact, keenly aware of this argument. Philippe Le Hegaret, the man in charge of the organization’s HTML-related developments, told me in an interview a few months ago that the confusion was becoming widespread and said the W3C preferred the term “open web platform”.

Nowadays in the larger audience, it’s more used to mean what we call ourselves the “open web platform” — a set of specifications that are all interacting together, including HTML5, CSS3, SVG, the geolocation API. People use the term HTML5 to refer to this big platform, but we’re talking about a string of specifications that are not developing at the same speed or being rolled out at the same speed.

So why is the W3C taking this bizarre turn?

In large part, it’s media pressure; news outlets have been guilty of conflating a range of different technologies together under a buzzword banner. That leads to a sort of general consensus that if everyone else is using a term, then it must become the right term.

But it’s more than that. There are two more factors that have brought us to the point where the people who are supposed to be in charge of the web’s future have decided that deliberately confusing people is the right thing to do.

First, the HTML5 fiasco is a reflection of the W3C’s own feelings of inadequacy. It has always struggled with its image as a huge, sprawling bureaucracy that can’t make decisions. This in turn has made it very difficult for the group to successfully market technologies that it works on.

Unlike a commercial organization which might create a brand early on that encapsulates its ideas and then push a variety of products under that banner, the W3C saw how “HTML5″ was being used and realized it might have inadvertently created a buzzword — and is now trying to cram as many things into the same jar as possible.

But reactive marketing like this is rarely successful, and comes across as a sign of panic, not confidence.

Then there’s the fact this new development is also a bizarre expression of guilt. After all, the W3C spent years trying to kill off HTML and replace it with XHTML before finally admitting defeat to the browser vendors and admitting that it didn’t know best. (There’s a good outline of the battle in Mark Pilgrim’s book Dive Into HTML5, or in this article I wrote back in November.

Having tried to assassinate a system that has now captured the public imagination, a haunted W3C is now furiously backpedaling to give it as much support as possible. Looking at it this way, I almost feel sorry for the W3C and the logo itself. They’re just capricious children who are acting out. But the trouble is that newfound enthusiasm can quickly turn to overkill, and if the web’s overseers really love HTML, then the last thing they should want to do is suffocate it.

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Hosted by Brian Kimmet and Ginger Gonzaga, The Morning After takes a TV-obsessed look at pop culture, with the first two episodes covering the Golden Globes, Piers Morgan’s new CNN series and the latest developments on The Bachelor. New episodes are available every weekday on both Hulu and Hulu Plus, though are currently geoblocked to the United States.

According to the blog post announcing the project, written by Hulu SVP Andy Forssell:

When we read the discussions boards on Hulu.com and tweets from our users, it’s clear to us that enjoying Hulu is about more than any one show. It’s also about how your favorite shows relate to the rest of what is going on in pop culture… Lately, our users have been asking us for a quick and fun way to stay current on the latest in pop culture. We looked far and wide for a show that struck the right balance between being entertaining and being informative, but we just couldn’t find something that hit the mark.

Which, therefore, is why Hulu had to go create its own show. Sort of.

The Morning After, technically, is not the first original content that Hulu has partnered with — technically, that would be last year’s reality series If I Can Dream, which recently completed its first season. Hulu is also the distributor of original series like The LXD and the upcoming Kiefer Sutherland-starring series The Confession.

However, while all of these shows are produced by outside production companies, Morning After is the first show where Hulu originated the initial idea, then reached out to find a production company to create the show. Jace Hall’s HD Films collaborated on the concept for the show and also handles all production; the company already has a background in multi-platform production thanks to other original series like The Jace Hall Show.

So far, Morning After is a little stiffer than Jace Hall was, heavy on the clips but light on personality. Despite the tightness of the format, though, both Kimmet and Gonzaga seem to have the potential to loosen up a bit behind that desk — provided, of course, that they get the chance.

However, that may very well come: Forssell is very upfront about the fact that the show is a work in progress. From the blog: “We consider this our ‘preview’ period for The Morning After. It’s a chance for us to develop and evolve the show with your input.” Because, ultimately, the show is meant to be a service for Hulu users, and thus it’s audience response that will drive the direction of the show — and determine its success.

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Once you’ve created an account and logged in, you simply authorize the services you want the app to connect to. Trunk.ly will then start collecting any links you share, and it’ll also go back and gather any links you’ve shared in the past from your accounts, too.

Links are displayed in chronological order on the homepage with icons to indicate where they’ve come from, along with any tags and the tweet or message included with the original link. The listing of links is interesting to scroll through but probably not all that useful; where Trunk.ly shines is in its fast search feature, which filters the listing of links as you type, providing a quick way to find links you posted previously. For example, if you vaguely remember sharing a link to an awesome martini recipe a few weeks back and want to find it again, you can use Trunk.ly to dig it out of your archives.

While there’s a bookmarklet for adding links manually to your Trunk.ly account, as well as some social features (you can follow other Trunk.ly users and see their links, and you can also see when other users share the same links as you), it probably isn’t going to replace the existing dedicated social bookmarking services like Pinboard and Delicious, unless you happen to post every single link you’d like to recall to a social media account. However, it is an easy way to maintain a no-effort, zero-cost archive of all those links that you share online.

Let us know what you think of Trunk.ly below.

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“Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so,” wrote Douglas Purdy, director of developer relations on the Facebook developer blog.

The move suggests that Facebook is learning that it needs to tread more carefully with user information and is being more responsive to privacy concerns. Facebook introduced the change on late Friday night, making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible as part of its User Graph. The change would expose a person’s contact information to a third-party developer but would not release a user’s friends’ information. Facebook said the new feature would allows users to easily share their address and mobile phone in order to streamline the checkout process at a shopping site or obtain timely mobile alerts on special deals.

But the update touched off concerns that the permission system did not do a good enough job in explaining how much sensitive data was about to shared. In a worst-case scenario, some worried the new feature would further enable rogue applications to spam Facebook users and could prompt potential identity theft.

Now, Facebook is backing away from the move until it can come up with a better approach to this change. It may not be anything significant but it could represent more steps in the permission flow to highlight the sensitive data being shared. Right now, a lot of Facebook users blindly click through the permissions, something some developers can take advantage of. As it moves to make more information available, it makes sense for Facebook to go out of its way to ensure that its users are fully aware of how much access they’re granting third-party apps and websites. It not only protects those users but it signals that Facebook is concerned about its users’ privacy, something many are not quite convinced of. We’ll know in a few weeks if Facebook is actually taking a more thoughtful approach to information sharing and its permission system, or if it’s just waiting for some of the latest controversy to die down.

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Cheezburger — the blog network that brought you I Can Has Cheezburger, the Fail blog, Engrish Funny and many other similar humor-oriented sites — today announced that it has closed a $30-million round of funding from a group of venture capital firms including Foundry Group and SoftBank Capital. The company said it plans to use the funds to build up its staff and grow the network in new directions. Brad Feld of Foundry Group will also be joining the Cheezburger board of directors.

The financing is a hefty validation for the company, which CEO Ben Huh has built into a major media entity after acquiring the original I Can Has Cheezburger website three years ago from the two bloggers who started it. (The site has even branched out into video.) The company, which has grown to more than 40 employees, has not taken any outside investment since that initial round of angel financing. In addition to Foundry Group and Japan’s SoftBank, the latest funding round includes Madrona Venture Group and Avalon Ventures, and representatives from both companies will also be joining the board.

Cheezburger said it currently has 16.5 million unique visitors per month and over 375 million pageviews, and that it plans to become “the largest humor network in the world.” Among the other companies chasing that niche is the Cracked.com network, which is owned by “content farm” Demand Media — a company that has filed to go public in an initial stock offering later this month that could value Demand at over $1.5 billion. In many ways, the Cheezburger network has taken the same “user-generated content” approach to humor that Demand has to other topics, since most of its content comes from others.

Cheezburger’s chief revenue officer talked to the New York Times last year about what has made the network so successful (it has been profitable since the beginning), and he noted that only about one percent of the content that comes into the various hubs the company operates — there are more than 50 of them in all — gets used on the websites. The rest winds up being used for merchandise related to the sites, such as T-shirts, laptop stickers and so on. The company also publishes books and wall calendars that aggregate the LOLcats and other images that appear on its sites.

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Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user JP Puerta