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Google is doing everything it can to integrate the Google+ social network into all of its properties, so that it can become a “social layer” across the entire company. But that same behavior is irritating users like actor — and prominent Google+ user — Wil Wheaton. Read More »

On the occasion of the first anniversary as the chief executive officer, Larry Page shared a letter with company’s investors. While reading the letter, some stats caught my eye that are simply staggering, regardless of how one feels about the company. Read More »

 
 

We’ve gotten used to the content industries arguing that what happens when people download or make copies is “theft.” But using that term muddies the waters when it comes to what copyright is supposed to be about, and lends support to irrational laws and court decisions. Read More »

Citizen journalism and social-media tools have made it easier to get information out of countries like Egypt and Syria, but in some cases these reports may not be true. Does that mean citizen journalism is unreliable? No. It just means we need to approach it differently. Read More »

The Kony2012 campaign from Invisible Children is one of the most viral social-media campaigns of all time. But is it a sign of how powerful social media can be as a news-distribution mechanism, a sign of how dangerous it can be or both? Read More »

Kill Hollywood? You’re 100 years too late

Silicon Valley startups may be trying to free the entertainment industry from Hollywood’s death grip. But anyone who wants to kill Hollywood deserves a history lesson in its tenacious will to survive. Screenwriter Steven E. de Souza and Scripted.com CEO Sunil Rajaraman explain why. Read More »

Bleacher Report launches hyper-specialized YouTube channels

Bleacher Report appears determined to prove that love of minutia-based sports fare has no bounds. Today, the upstart sports site announced the launch of new YouTube channels, though its business strategy behind these video offerings isn’t clear. Read More »

Megaupload sued Universal Music in federal court today, alleging that the music label is trying to censor a promotional video for the file hoster through bogus take-down notices. However, Universal said that some of the artists depicted in the video never consented to it. Read More »

The principle behind copyright has been taking a beating from “remix culture,” driven in large part by YouTube and other video sites. Is the rise of the YouTube generation changing the way that we think about copyright — and if so, should we let that happen? Read More »

Topforty.it turns Twitter into a DJ

Hey Mister DJ, turn the tweet hits up: Topforty.it is using Twitter’s collective music favorites to come up with daily music charts. Each and every song is playable through YouTube embeds, and the site is already working on plans to launch genre-specific Twitter radio stations. Read More »

Celebrity angels: a fad or the future?

The trend of ‘celebrity angels’ isn’t exactly surprising. But why are we suddenly seeing celebrities become more involved in tech investing? Hunter Walk of YouTube offers three possible explanations, and pulls together choice quotations from top consumer internet moneymen. Read More »

Voting Booth

Another election year is nearly upon us, and if the past is any lesson, new uses of technology will impact the outcome in many new and unpredictable ways. Read More »

More Must Reads

Some of Web 2.0′s brightest talents are returning with new projects, from revitalized bookmarking sites to fresh online games. But the challenges they face today are different than back in 2005, because the internet is radically changed — not least because of Facebook. Can they succeed? Read More »

Sold by Yahoo to the founders of YouTube, social bookmarking service Delicious is one of the great survivors of Web 2.0. But can a revamp convince new users to bookmark the web — and keep the old ones happy at the same time? Read More »

Charlie McDonnell is just 20 years old, but he’s already earning a living as Britain’s most popular YouTube video blogger. What’s the secret of success? And what can the industry — video companies or broadcasters — learn from his experiences? Read More »

The Daily Dot wants to be the “hometown newspaper for the Internet,” but how many of its stories about Reddit photos or YouTube videos will be of interest to anyone outside of those communities? And does the newspaper metaphor make any sense for an online-publishing venture? Read More »

Fresh off its $50 million in funding, note-taking and memory service Evernote is preparing for its first-ever developer conference next month, where it will outline its broader strategy and how it plans on becoming a 100-year company by building a productivity platform. Read More »

More employees toting mobile devices don’t have to cause harm to large enterprises with strict IT compliance rules. In fact, those employees armed with tablets and smartphones can be trained to become brand ambassadors on social media sites and to help the company’s image. Read More »

Google released its second-quarter financials on Thursday, hitting its first quarter with more than $9 billion in revenue. But on a call with financial analysts, it gave a whole bunch of nonfinancial metrics for how its various businesses are growing. Read More »

The web is enabling an explosion of “remix culture,” but as Kickstarter co-founder and blogger Andy Baio recently discovered, “fair use” only applies if you can afford to fight for your idea in court. What does that mean for the future of the remixable web? Read More »

The web may have revolutionized video and audio, but the humble still image hasn’t altered much over the years. That could change thanks to Finland’s Thinglink, which has unveiled the latest part of its plan to turn photographs into a true multimedia platform. Read More »

AVOS, the new startup run by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, could be targeting the consumer and brand research market with its acquisition of Tap11. Such a move would pit the startup against tech industry stalwarts like Google and Salesforce. Read More »

No it ain’t true. Media these days are funny. Soon I’ll be reading that Spotify is launching a space rocket. Daniel Ek, co-founder, Spotify in a tweet this morning categorically denied that his company has any negotiations underway to stream movies in addition to music, as reportedRead More »

The story of homeless radio announcer Ted Williams became an Internet sensation this week. But the video that started it all is no longer available on YouTube, in yet another example of a newspaper that can’t see the forest for the dead trees. Read More »

Google dominated the Android news this week, as the company announced a number of products and updates. Front and center was the Nexus S and Gingerbread (Android 2.3), and we had a quick unboxing video. Gmail got Priority Inbox support, and YouTube got a facelift. Read More »

Five years after co-founding YouTube, long-time CEO Chad Hurley is stepping down from that position, according to TechCrunch. He’s been transitioning away from the CEO role for the last two years, ceding most day-to-day business decisions to Google’s former VP of web applications Salar Kamangar. Read More »

Google today on its quarterly earnings call broke out some numbers that it doesn’t historically give (and doesn’t promise to give in the future): revenue and monetization rates for display, video and mobile advertising. The intent was to show that Google isn’t just a search company. … Read More »

Facebook is continuing to grow, but not all of that growth is due to features and functions of the web-based social networking service. The trend towards Facebook-enabled hardware shows no sign of stopping: cameras, picture frames, televisions and more are bringing Facebook everywhere for consumers. Read More »

Presenters at the Smash Summit on social media marketing in San Francisco today offered up a few solid case studies about tweaks that worked. Here are some of the ones I picked up from Facebook, YouTube, Wildfire Interactive and Digg. Read More »

Building a business that is largely based on user-generated content seems like a great idea, until those users decide to post what they want instead of what you want. Amazon and Yelp are two of the most recent companies to experience the downside of user-generated reviews. Read More »

An Italian court found three Google executives guilty of privacy violations for a video uploaded to the company’s site, focusing attention on a key question: Is Google a service provider or a media company? And if it’s the latter, what responsibility does it have for content? Read More »

On the text web, arbitrage has become the word of the day as whole ecosystems have sprung up to optimize and monetize the link economy. But when it comes to online video, the arbitrage model is failing badly. Read More »

YouTube has launched a violence, profanity and porn filter for the video-sharing site that it is calling “Safety Mode.” When the setting is clicked, searches for certain terms will return no results, and comments on videos are hidden by default, and have profanity replaced by asterisks. Read More »

Video is driving the projected increase in both mobile and wired broadband, but it’s not only the proliferation of video that’s the problem for mobile operators, it’s the relative ease that consumers now have accessing it. And that’s causing mobile operators to rethink their pricing plans. Read More »

A few years back when big media companies were snatching up web startups for exorbitant prices, old-fashioned concepts like corporate synergy were not a priority. Many acquisitions came with promises to leave startup’s brands, products and leadership alone. That didn’t end up working so well. Read More »

I am at Le Web, which is being held in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Paris. I’ve been in the city, which is currently gray and wet, for about 48 hours. Following is a recap of the first two days. Read More »

While the Googlebot’s YouTube is a web video behemoth, Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook nation have become an online video sleeping giant, and it may have just woken up. Facebook jumped to No. 3 behind established video powerhouses YouTube and Hulu in terms of total … Read More »

People will consume an exabyte — that’s 1 million terabytes — of information on mobile networks this year, predicts independent wireless analyst Chetan Sharma in his latest report, entitled “Managing Growth and Profit in the Yottabyte Era.” (A yottabyte is 1,000 billion terabytes.)  Sharma … Read More »

The protests in Iran that have come in the wake of the country’s June 13 election results, which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, have showcased the rise of social media like Twitter, Facebook and even cell phone video taken in the streets and uploaded … Read More »

BT, the largest broadband provider in the UK, has said it plans to charge video content providers for the amount of bandwidth they consume on BT’s network, according to a story in Thursday’s Financial Times. The paper quotes John Petter, managing director of BT Retail’s … Read More »

Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen a lot of new content offerings announced by companies like Netflix, Amazon and YouTube as they look to directly target the living room via entertainment devices. Indeed, the adoption rate of hardware devices like the Xbox 360, … Read More »

Googlers probably can’t wait for this week to end. After a rash of problems with search, GMail and Blogger — now YouTube has gone on the fritz (Update: YouTube search is back up and working). What’s got to smart even worse is that … Read More »

Somebody somewhere in the Adobe offices must be getting pretty nervous. Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, an also-ran competitor to Flash, suddenly got a YouTube boost. Liz reports that YouTube will carry live video of March Madness, thanks to its partnership with CBS — and it’s … Read More »

Hulu celebrates the one-year anniversary of its public launch today, and it’s getting social by adding Facebook and MySpace functionality. Many skeptics (*cough* Om *cough*) originally dismissed the joint venture between FOX and NBC as something that couldn’t work, but over the last year … Read More »

The poor economy dominated the scene at CES this year, and it led highly anxious exhibitors to highlight lower prices for gadgets like netbooks, cell phones, and A/V devices. The jittery economy is pushing consumers to look for value, and aggressive price points … Read More »

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