A Universal spokesperson sent us the following statement via email:

“This is an on-going dispute that surfaced several weeks ago with respect to the unauthorized use of a performance from one of our artists. We heard from a number of our other artists (and their representatives) who told us they’ve never consented to being portrayed in this video. As a result, at least one of them has already sent a takedown notice for this unauthorized use.”

The controversial Hong Kong-based file hoster released a music video featuring endorsements of numerous well-known pop stars and celebrities late last week. The video, which included appearances by Kanye West, Ciara, will.i.am, Kim Kardashian and Serena Wiliams, was taken down from YouTube just hours after it became popular on the site. Megaupload then filed a counter-notice, to which YouTube responded by reinstating the video. This move was quickly followed by another take-down notice, resulting in the video disappearing again.

Megaupload proceeded to file a lawsuit (PDF) against Universal in a US District Court today, seeking an injunction against the record label as well as damages. In the lawsuit, it states that all of the artists involved in the production of and shown in the video “executed full releases of any intellectual property rights to the promotional video, including use of likeness and promotional rights.” The lawsuit also alleges that this is merely an attempt to control what artists can and can’t endorse: “It appears as though UMG permits recording artists to exercise their views and free speech only when UMG agrees with such speech,” it states.

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If there’s one concept that has suffered more damage than just about anything else as a result of the web and the ongoing explosion of digital media, it’s copyright: the idea that a content creator should have virtually unlimited control over his or her creation, regardless of what form it takes. As blogger Andy Baio notes in a recent post, 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 we think about copyright — and if so, should we let that happen? Do we even have a choice?

Baio, a long-time digital journalist who blogs at Waxy.org and is also a former CTO of Kickstarter and a staffer at Expert Labs, notes that a huge number of the users who post mashups and other video interpretations of popular music to YouTube seem to have only a hazy idea of what copyright is, or how it’s applied to works like the ones they are uploading. As he notes, there are close to a million videos on the site that contain phrases like “no copyright infringement intended” or invoke the “fair use” clause in U.S. copyright legislation. In the vast majority of cases, these videos are probably illegal under the current law.

If YouTube uploads are illegal, is the law wrong?

Saying things like “No copyright infringement — I only put this up as a project” (as one video uploader did when they posted a version of the movie Pulp Fiction reassembled into chronological order) has no real legal force or effect, as Baio points out. Whether fair-use principles would apply to these kinds of creations is a more difficult question to answer, since the definition of fair use is notoriously complex. The courts use the so-called “four factors” test, which assesses the nature of the re-use, the intent of the new work and the impact that it has on the original. But as Baio notes:

Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is technically illegal. Every fan-made music video, every mashup album, every supercut, every fanfic story? Quite probably illegal, though largely untested in court.

There are a number of ways of looking at this kind of activity: if you are a copyright holder or a lawyer or an organization like the Motion Picture Association of America, you can see it as theft, pure and simple — and you can file thousands of takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (including some fairly absurd cases where music appears in the background of a video), or push for even more regressive and punitive legislation like the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, which would allow you to remove websites from the Internet permanently, among other things.

At some level, however, this approach arguably turns into self-defeating strategy for the media and content industries. I think Baio is right when he suggests that the “remix culture” that many of these YouTube users identify with is actually changing the way that an entire generation thinks about copyright, for better or worse (and I would argue it is for the better). For them, the “fair use” principle is far broader than the courts would probably define it — and who is to say that they are wrong? Says Baio:

No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I’d wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it’s legal already.

Remix culture is becoming the norm

As I’ve pointed out before, my teenaged and older daughters experience popular media of all kinds through remixes of some sort or other. Whether it’s a TV show like Doctor Who or Glee, or a popular song, or a movie like the Twilight series, they are almost constantly sharing remixes, mashups, parodies and other references through social platforms like YouTube and Facebook and Tumblr. Almost every one of these is probably illegal (although some might be covered by fair use if they ever went to court).

Should all of this content be removed from the Internet or the uploaders and creators of mashups be prosecuted? That’s the traditional media industry’s response, but I think it is incredibly short-sighted. If you are a modern media company, you should want your content to be shared and remixed in this way. In fact, you should be making it easier for this to happen, not harder. That kind of sharing is how content is distributed now.

I think Baio (who has had his own run-ins with copyright holders over a mashup he created) has a point when he argues that remix culture is “the new Prohibition,” with media companies fighting a losing battle against behavior that a growing proportion of the population thinks is perfectly fine. And he also points out that most of the YouTube generation are now old enough to vote, and could soon start being elected to office. Will that start to change the way that we look at copyright for good?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Dawn Endico and Sandy Honig

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Topforty’s current incarnation, which launched a week ago at the Velocity Demo day, is actually pretty neat already: It displays Twitter’s top tunes in a highly visual way, and utilizes YouTube embeds to make each and every entry playable. A video player on top of the page even makes it possible to listen to all 40 songs nonstop, or shuffle through them. The site also tells us how many people tweeted about any particular song and how its standing has changed when compared to the previous day.

The idea behind the site may sound a little like We Are Hunted, a service that has been tracking popular songs on P2P services and social networks for quite some time. Bajraktari, however, thinks there are some important differences. “Our ranking and discovery process tends to me much more transparent,” he told me via email. “With We Are Hunted it is hard to figure out how the popularity of the songs is being impacted and how it is changing overtime.”

Bajraktari said Topforty.it is already seeing very long engagement periods, with people keeping the site open for quite some time. He wants to further engage all these eyeballs with the upcoming launch of genre-specific radio stations that turn Twitter into a real-time DJ, with tweets being used to program each and every stream. He explains:

Different streams will exist based on genres at first, and as tweets come into Twitter mentioning songs in these streams they will be added to the queues the users are listening to. All of this will be in real-time as Twitter users tweet away, and of course fully transparent!

Topforty is a pretty neat mashup of Twitter and YouTube, and I’m looking forward to see how the Twitter-as-a-DJ incarnation will look like. But the site is also a good reminder of how much music is now available on YouTube. Granted, I stumbled across the odd cover version, but otherwise, YouTube seems perfectly capable of powering a crowd-sourced music service like this.

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Some might snicker upon hearing that Disney singer/actress Selena Gomez has Angel invested in a photo app but I think it’s great, and makes total sense. The trend of ‘celebrity angels’ doesn’t surprise me at all, and with correct expectations on both sides, it can provide great value to both sides. But this still leaves the question — why are we suddenly seeing celebrities become more involved in tech investing?

1. Technology is approachable & hot

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Voting Booth

Another presidential election year is a month away, and just as with every election cycle, technology will play a critical role in determining who the next President of the United States will be.

Have your doubts? Just look at the last two elections.

In 2004, the rise of blogs opened the door to an influential new source of political commentary outside the traditional press,while in 2008, we witnessed the rapid rise of social media (and the Obama campaign’s early embrace of it), which played a big role in dissemination of messaging as well as fundraising.

In both elections, the growth of online video proved important; 2004 saw mainly short-form political entertainment/commentary from the likes of JibJab, but by 2008 both parties saw online video as a real competitive weapon, and YouTube became the testing ground in efforts to find a “Daisy”-like message to sway voters.

Just how will technology be part of the story in the 2012 election?  Here are four possible ways:

Mobile

Since money is, for better and for worse, the lifeblood of American election politics, it seems there are always new ways to utilize technology to raise money.  Just a few years ago, it was novel to have a website as a central way to raise money for an election on the Internet, and more recently, social media has become an important part of fundraising for any campaign.

So what technology could play an important role in fundraising in 2012?  The simple answer is the mobile phone. We’ve already seen Square being used at political fundraisers and multipurpose mobile apps like Mobilecause for fundraising and communication, and as I’ve written previously,  there’s no reason in-app payments couldn’t be extended to apps such as enhanced e-books.  Expect all the major candidates to make mobile a big part of their fundraising and messaging efforts throughout the year.

Twitter Mistakes

If 2008 was the year Facebook wagged the dog in terms of social media’s impact on politics, 2012 might be the year in which Twitter could prove decisive.  Over the past few years, Twitter has become the new real-time newswire for influencers and the media, and it has emerged as a way for candidates to connect directly to constituents without the filter of campaign managers and media experts.

However, Twitter has also shown why a filter is sometimes necessary.  The unfortunately (and appropriately) named Congressman Anthony Weiner got his own “gate” as a result of accidentally tweeting lewd photos of himself, and other politicians in the States and elsewhere have shown it’s all too easy to hit that tweet button.

With more politicians tweeting and at greater frequency, there’s no doubt Twitter could play a big role in 2012, and in possibly unforeseen and unwanted ways.

Big Data Analytics

While Facebook proved significant in 2008 as a way to build a following for a candidate, it was early days for social media and big data analytics in general. Four years later, it is likely savvy use of analytics by a candidate to sift through the mountains of data made available through social, mobile and other types of profiling and behavioral data could give them a significant advantage over their opponent.  Political campaigns have already proven themselves to be  fairly advanced users of polling analytics and there is no doubt that campaigns will only double down this election cycle on data scientists to possibly squeeze more advantages out of the huge cache of new data available from a variety of new sources.

Internet activism

In 2010 and 2011, one of the biggest political stories of all had nothing to do with traditional political establishments, but instead was about the rise of a new form of political activism on the Internet.  Wikileaks showed how by releasing huge caches of documents about political actors online could destabilize traditional political establishments, while new groups such as Anonymous showed that the Internet is the new frontier for civil disobedience.

How will the use of Internet political activism take shape in 2012?  It’s impossible to predict at this point, other than to say there’s a high likelihood that new and existing groups will likely try to make their voices heard in new and unforeseen ways, making this new frontier of Internet activism perhaps the biggest x-factor of all in next year’s Presidential election.

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When social-bookmarking pioneer Delicious arrived with a new design and the beginnings of a new service, it wasn’t just a significant moment for the site’s fans and critics. Sure, the purists might not be happy — a number of features seem to have disappeared — and there’s always the chance it could revitalize a brand that has looked unloved for a long time. But it was interesting in broader terms, too.

What makes the return of Delicious really fascinating to me is that it’s the latest sign of a resurgence in activity by some of the people who were the earliest pioneers of the social-web boom, back in the middle of the last decade. Delicious, after all, is a former “Web 2.0″ staple that’s being regenerated thanks to the work of two other prominent Web 2.0 founders: YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

And the relaunch is timed, coincidentally enough, just as another Web 2.0 veteran — Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield — also returns to the fold. Tuesday sees the public launch of Glitch, the cute, massively multiplayer online game he’s been developing for the last 18 months or so — a sort of surreal Mario-meets-World of Warcraft. (Disclosure: my girlfriend works as a contractor on Glitch, and I count a substantial portion of the team members as friends).

It’s not just a return to the front line for Butterfield, but also to Flickr’s roots. The photo-sharing site started off, after all, as the offshoot of a project called Game Never Ending. Watching these two moments is a bit like a flash back to six years ago, when the bright young things of Web 2.0 were starting to assert their influence over the future.

Welcome back, class of 2005

Six years ago, there was a crop of audacious founders who made their names cashing in and setting the Web 2.0 boom into motion. In the space of just a few months, Rupert Murdoch had purchased Myspace, Skype was bought by eBay, and Yahoo had gone on a spending spree that resulted in a dizzying sequence of purchases: Delicious, Flickr, MyBlogLog and more. These were all big bets, not least at Yahoo — which looked as if, for a while at least, it might use those deals to create the core of a new, faster company built around social information.

There’s no doubt that this group of entrepreneurs, whether they sold their businesses for millions or billions, were ahead of the game. Today, the ideas they laid out are writ large across the web: YouTube is even more enormous than it was in the past, trading links has become a real core of online activity, and no site would seriously consider launching without social elements.

But ever since its companies sold, 2005′s graduating class has seen the direction and shape of the web move away from them. Essentially, as Facebook rose, so their influence has faded. And so now we seem them attempting to come back and prove they can do it all over again: There’s Hurley, Chen, Butterfield. There’s Caterina Fake, Flickr’s other co-founder, who is currently hard at work on a new stealth startup called 2bkco (see disclosure). And while Delicious founder Joshua Schachter might not be involved in the new version of the site he created, he’s running another company dedicated to making social software more useful.

Beyond building things they like, what is it they are all trying to do? Do they want to claw back some of that influence, or prove that the ideas they had in the past are still important? It’s hard to say. Certainly, they are all more than simply lucky, because they are clearly talented people. But here’s the thing: the web looks like a very different place today than it did back then.

In reality, the company each of these entrepreneurs probably thought they could build is what we know as Facebook. But the Facebook of today is a radically different kind of service than the one they imagined, and it’s native to a different kind of web than the one inhabited by Delicious or Flickr or any of the others. It’s rapaciously hungry, unashamed to force us to behave in particular ways — and prepared to collect an overwhelming volume of data to get what it wants.

Sometimes it feels as if the early social sites are like internal combustion engines, purring away happily while Facebook powers up like a particle accelerator. And that’s why it’s important for this returning group of entrepreneurs to do more than simply bring the ideas they had in the past back to life.

Silicon Valley is populated with people who got lucky once and cashed out, usually thanks to the largesse of a free-spending major corporation like Google, Microsoft or (now) Facebook. Many simply disappear with their winnings and are never heard of again. Others return with new ideas and new companies. Why? Partly because that’s the only thing they know how to do — and partly because they want to prove that they weren’t just fortunate, they were good. And that’s the challenge facing this latest crop of success stories, too. How they fare remains to be seen.

Disclosure: 2bkco is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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After a wobbly few months, the site was bought by AVOS, a new company formed by YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, who promised “to take on the challenge of building the best information-discovery service on the web.”

Now we get to see exactly what they mean. The new-look Delicious launched overnight.

So what do you get? Let’s take a look.

First up, signing up is easy. Although I was a long-time Delicious user, first joining back in 2005, I stopped using the service last year and defected to Pinboard.in, a great clone aimed at power users. In fact, when AVOS moved to the new Delicious, they actually deleted my original account. So I was able to use the service as if for the first time.

Once inside, there are some obvious visual changes. Everything has a slightly warmer, softer tone; gone are the sharp edges and minimalist presentations that made Delicious look like the work of an engineer.

Popular links are presented in a straightforward list, while groups of links (known as “stacks”) are pushed to users in a glossy format supported by photographs. It’s nice eye candy, but takes up a lot of screen space.

In terms of functionality? Well, it’s tempting to say that the new Delicious is a bit like Pepsi of old: “new look, same great taste”. But it’s probably more accurate to simply point out that the revamp is less than radical.

Most of the obvious changes are essentially updating the slightly dated lexicon of Delicious and bringing it in line with a more modern, social web context. For example, users can now add avatars — something that seems almost idiotically simple, but had never emerged with its previous, spartan approach.

Elsewhere, users now “follow” somebody instead of adding them to their network. And collections of links — which were previously known as bundles — have become “stacks”. These are described as playlists for the web, a signpost that AVOS wants to make Delicious more appealing to mainstream audiences.

In truth, however, none of this is a major departure from what Delicious already did, and it’s certainly not much of a departure from other link collecting or list-making tools such as Bitly.

In a blog post announcing the launch, AVOS admits that most of the work was behind the scenes, rather than in adding new elements to the site.

We realized that in order to keep innovating over the long term, the eight-year-old site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The result is a new homepage, interface and back-end architecture designed to make Delicious easier to use.

We’re proud of what we built, but the process has also brought the site “back to beta” as a work in progress.

But in doing so, it’s also managed to break some things that old-time users were used to. A string of my Twitter followers pointed out broken features. For example, existing users complain that their old bundles seem to have disappeared completely; there are lots of reports of problems with browser plug-ins, RSS feeds appear to have stopped working and some of the old pages aren’t working.

Still, these are early days. The product is essentially starting over again, and if users are prepared to accept that this is a beta then there is time — and trust — to rebuild.

Can new users be enticed? Will old users stick around? Even though the new Delicious looks juicier, it’s not clear whether the flavor it had has disappeared or been improved upon. Either way, it looks like the hard work is only just beginning.

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In other ways, however, McDonnell is utterly remarkable.

Four years ago, he started a YouTube channel called Charlie Is So Cool Like, and began posting fun videos and songs. It just kept growing until, over the summer, he became the first British YouTube user to break 1 million subscribers.

Thanks to his fame — in particular a large following of teenage girls — he’s tried his hand at TV presenting, been on the set of Doctor Who (his favorite show) and had a charity record in the British charts.

But what does it mean to have a million subscribers? And what opportunities has it created? I caught up with him to find out the secrets to becoming a YouTube superstar. It was pretty informative, not just for those who want to emulate his web success — but also for broadcasters wanting to learn from online success stories.

Gaining a YouTube following can be profitable

“I’ve been living off the back of my YouTube stuff — which isn’t just ad revenue; I sell albums and things like that as well — but I’ve been earning enough that I’ve been renting a flat with my flatmate Alex, who’s another video blogger. We’ve been living here for about a year and a half now; we’ve got to the point where we realized we’re earning enough to buy a house. And it’s all off the back of YouTube.”

Online video stars don’t necessarily see TV as their end goal

It’s traditional for television producers to try to pick out online talent, either for their raw talent or, sometimes, to harness their audience. But while some may still dream of being on network TV, Charlie is part of a generation that is increasingly seeing online media as their home — not broadcast.

“I’ve been contacted by various production companies and broadcasters; I’ve been approached by managers,” says McDonnell. “The general consensus from most people is, ‘This thing online is pretty good, but when are you going to take it seriously and make a TV show?’

“For me, it’s always been hard to justify doing stuff on television. To an outsider, it might seem like that’s your big break, but being able to learn about how TV works over the last couple of years, I’ve generally come to the conclusion that I much prefer doing stuff online — it’s freer for me.”

As far as the TV shows he has worked on, the producers often seemed to want his audience — when what they really needed was his total buy-in.

“It wasn’t beneficial for me in terms of building up an audience, but they assumed that my audience would go with me, which isn’t necessarily the case. It’s hard to get massively invested in projects when they come to you with an idea, because I feel like I’m just working for them. My own stuff, I’m happier telling my audience about.”

Control is vitally important

“People see me talking to the camera and think ‘he’s obviously the presenter,’” he says. “But that’s because that’s what they see me doing.”

In fact, he’s as interested in the ideas and the processes behind his videos as he is in being in front of camera. In the future, he’d like to make short films and is even thinking about feature films. But it’s not just about getting his face on screen.

“They might think about the fact that I’m doing everything myself, but they won’t give it much thought whether I’d be interested in producing a show. It’s hard for people to take me as anything other than a presenter.”

Don’t target demographics

“From what I know, the demographic I have is sought-after; it’s 13-18 year old girls; it’s the biggest demographic I have,” he says. “But I’m in the position where I didn’t sit down and think, ‘How could I appeal to 17 year old girls?’ I just made videos, and that happens to be the people who are watching. There’s still enough people outside that demographic that I don’t want to ignore them — it’s important for me not to think about demographics at all.”

He won’t be lured away

I can’t count the number of times people building video platforms have told me that part of their plan is to lure big YouTube channels away. But it’s a mistake to imagine that you can simply by offering them more money — or even more viewers, he says.

“Right now YouTube is where all the people go. I do like websites like Vimeo — YouTube can, at times, be people making videos because they want to trick people into giving them views — but at the same time there aren’t as many people watching videos there. So it’s very hard for you to make it into your job.

“But YouTube is not a faceless website any more. When you’ve been making videos for as long as we have, we have direct contact with the people who work there. It feels much more like a partnership I have with them. I really don’t think there would be any other competitor that would convince me to leave. Even if there was another site that became more popular, I still feel very strong ties to YouTube, and I’d want to work with them to make YouTube top dog again.”

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Does the web really need a “hometown newspaper?” The founders of The Daily Dot think it does, so they went ahead and built one. The site, which has been in invitation-only testing for several months, launched Tuesday as an open beta. Editor-in-chief Owen Thomas and CEO Nicholas White say they want to write about online communities like Reddit and YouTube as though they were real-world towns, with stories and personalities worth writing about. It’s an interesting concept, but how many of those stories will be of interest to anyone outside of those communities? And does the newspaper metaphor really make any sense for an online-publishing venture?

When I heard about The Daily Dot and the “hometown newspaper of the Internet” idea — which I wrote about when it launched in alpha in April – my first thought was that even actual newspapers don’t really want to be seen as newspapers any more, since the idea of a daily printed collection of news now seems anachronistic at best (although even digital news apps like AOL’s Editions seem determined to copy this format for some reason). So why would a brand new content site like The Daily Dot want to adopt a newspaper metaphor, and even create a design that mimics a small-town paper?

Are Reddit and Tumblr like small towns?

The point, as Thomas explained at the time — and as he and Nick White emphasized in a recent interview prior to Tuesday’s launch of the open beta — is that Reddit and YouTube and Twitter may be worlds that exist only online, but they are real communities, with gripping stories that deserve to be reported the same way a hometown newspaper would. This idea, which White credits to co-founder and financial backer Nova Spivack (who founded EarthWeb in 1994), resonated with The Daily Dot’s CEO because he comes from the fifth generation of a newspaper family: the owners of Sandusky Newspapers, which publishes community papers like the Sandusky Register in Ohio. Said White:

These online worlds are as much a community as any town, and in some cases, the online version is far more vibrant. We want to cover those communities the way the newspapers I grew up with covered their communities.

I’m all for the idea that online communities are similar to “real-world” communities, and probably more so than many people care to admit. And the idea of covering the stories that emerge from those communities makes a lot of sense as well, especially as we live more of our lives online. But that said, are Reddit or YouTube actually like small towns in any meaningful way? Not really. For one thing, although some people may spend a lot of time on them, no one actually lives there, and they don’t have the attributes that most towns have: i.e., stores, businesses, sports teams, local politicians, and so on, which is what most small-town papers write about.

Daily Dot wants to focus on the people

Reddit and YouTube and Tumblr have plenty of personalities in them, however, and that’s what The Daily Dot wants to focus on, says White, who quotes his newspaper-publisher father as saying “The names make the news.” And there are stories where the people behind the viral YouTube video, or the quirky Reddit link, are clearly interesting — such as the story that The Daily Dot wrote about the family whose young daughter recorded and uploaded a video of herself playing with a dead squirrel. Thomas says the video was widely criticized, but only The Daily Dot got hold of the parents, who explained that they saw the video as their daughter’s exploration of the concept of death.

There’s no question that was an interesting element to the story — but at the same time, it about a video of a girl playing with a dead squirrel. And based on my reading of the site while it was in invitation-only beta, many of The Daily Dot’s stories fall into this category: There’s a viral video and lots of people are wondering if it’s real, or there’s a link to a picture that may or may not be Photoshopped, or people on Reddit are talking about a soldier who adopted a kitten during World War II. On a recent day, four of the “front page” stories were about photos or videos of cats or other animals.

Are these small-town stories of broader interest?

One of the problems with The Daily Dot’s newspaper metaphor is this: If you’ve ever lived in a small town or read a newspaper from one, you know that many of the stories printed in them are of interest only to the people in that town, and in some cases, not even them. It could be the cat in a tree, or the butcher shop getting a new slicer, or the bookstore owner whose daughter got a scholarship to a big-name university — but the likelihood of those stories appealing to anyone outside that small town is roughly zero. When asked about the preponderance of kitten-related stories, Thomas said the site would be a “mix of light and serious, of low and high culture.”

But the bigger problem for The Daily Dot isn’t just that some of its stories may only be of interest to a small proportion of Tumblr devotees or Reddit followers. Just like any newspaper, the site — which has so far gotten $600,000 in investment from Spivack and others — also has to worry about whether advertisers are going to want to appear on its pages next to the story about the dead-squirrel video. Smith says the company is in talks with some advertisers and other potential partners, but it’s not clear to me how many of those kinds of advertisers there are to be found.

That’s not to say The Daily Dot doesn’t have plenty of quirky or interesting material to work with, but will it be enough to make the site a destination of any kind? I’m not convinced. I admire what Smith and Thomas are trying to do, and I think in some cases they will be able to get behind a story that has appeared on other sites like Gawker or The Awl or Mashable and tell us something interesting about it. But will that happen often enough to make me want to subscribe? I don’t think so.

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The Evernote Trunk Conference on August 18 in San Francisco signals a new phase for the Mountain View, Calif., company, which has grown to 12 million users and is adding a million new users a month. While the company has offered an API to developers since 2008, it is now finally embracing its role as a platform and is prepared to talk about how it wants to proceed with its ecosystem of 6,000 developers and 600 third-party apps and products.

I talked with CEO Phil Libin about the upcoming conference and where the company is going, and he explained that Evernote is in the midst of a shift, from one primary application that focuses on memory to a broader platform play that looks to increase user productivity. Evernote will pursue some of this on its own and through acquisitions and will look to developers to play a big role in advancing this goal.

I expect us to be a much broader company than where we are now. The idea is Evernote is going to have lots of applications to deal with the external brain and your memories. We’ll go from one app on lots of platforms to a family of products and services that play off a theme of the external brain.

He said a key distinction will be in how it emphasizes productivity. He said while people turn to Zynga or Facebook to kill time, he wants to vie for the other half of people’s time. And so Evernote will be focusing its messaging and its strategy on getting things accomplished through Evernote, anything to do with furthering life’s work, from eating at the best restaurants to working on a research product.

If we think that makes you productive, that’s part of the Evernote experience. Our value proposition has been in remembering. Put into the external brain and you can always get it out. That’s been our core message. But that’s been phase one, get out what you put in. Now phase two is getting out more than you put in, being smarter and having a system that augments your natural intelligence. It’s expanding from memory to a real external brain.

Libin said the company will share more details at the conference and will try to be very transparent to developers to help make clear where the company is headed and what opportunities it finds interesting. The conference will feature a series of interviews with people, including:

• Gordon Bell, a principal researcher at Microsoft working on life logging and cloud computing whose ideas helped inspire Evernote.
• Tim Ferris, an angel investor and best-selling author of the The 4-Hour Workweek.
• Guy Kawasaki, founder of Alltop and bestselling author.
• Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital who has invested in Square, YouTube, Tumblr, Evernote and other startups.
• Michael Hyatt, a publisher, speaker and writer on topics relating to leadership, productivity and Evernote.

The conference will also feature sessions aimed at helping developers build off Evernote’s API. And the company will also be announcing the winners of its developer contest.

If you’re interested in attending, the first 50 GigaOM readers can register here and get a 50 percent discount with the promo code “ETCGIGAOM.”

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Let’s start with the indie jewelry designer vs. Urban Outfitters story that went viral on Twitter. An Etsy-based designer claimed in a tweet that the clothing giant Urban Outfitters ripped off her necklace design. Within minutes, the designer was flooded with sympathetic responses. Urban Outfitters could have sustained a major credibility hit had the retailer not “heard” and responded early. As it turned out, Urban Outfitters was able to reassure the designer and salvage the brand image by joining the conversation.

The thing is, effective participation in social media requires a lot of listening. It requires much more than one corporate-appointed team, listening for a few hours a day, can be expected to handle. That’s where consumer tablets and smartphones come in.

Mobile consumer devices make it much easier to stay connected to social networks. Recent studies bear this out. In addition, 33 percent of the employees studied for a Gartner report admit to using their personal devices to connect to social media while at work. Each one of those employees has the potential to positively or negatively influence your brand on social networks. Why not turn that uncertainty into an advantage by training all of your employees to become brand ambassadors?

Is that a good use of company time? If you want to have an active hand in shaping your brand image on social networks, it is. And, anyway, where else could you get direct access to your customers’ thoughts as well as the opportunity to respond to them — in real time?

You may not be able to control what people say about your brand on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., but you — and your employees — can participate in the conversation early and often. Here are some suggestions to help you get started:

• Create a core competency around participating on social networks. Teach your employees how to represent your brand on the social networks. You’ll need to create a clearly defined practice — and then make sure everyone buys into it.
• Fence your data, not your people. Secure your data without limiting user access. For example, desktop virtualization provides anytime, anyplace employee access to their productivity resources — but your data never leaves the confines of a secure data center.
• Keep company and personal data separate — from the beginning. Let your employees bring their personal devices to work, but make sure they don’t mix their personal data with your corporate property. You can accomplish this by isolating company data in a virtual desktop on each device.

It’s true that the effort to embrace consumer smartphones and tablets in the enterprise workplace comes with IT challenges. But those challenges are not insurmountable — and the benefits are definitely worth the trouble. You just need a flexible mobile computing strategy that enables you to focus on controlling only what you really need to control. This will enable you to lead the process, not the other way around.

Ann Newman is the Dell Large Enterprise Client Editor and an active market-response writer. She created the Dell technology and solution websites that support large enterprise end users.

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In no particular order, here are the numbers about all the other stuff that various Google execs dropped over the course of its earnings call.

Google+ and social:

• More than 10 million Google+ users
• More than 1 billion items shared and received each day
• 2.3 billion +1 clicks each day

Android:

• 550,000 Android devices activated every day
• 135 million Android devices activated in total, up from 100 million at the start of the year
• 6 billion apps downloaded from the Android Market

YouTube:

• 3 billion daily video views
• 100 million viewers of the Royal Wedding on YouTube
• Over one-third of all YouTube’s in-stream ads are in its new skippable format

Other areas:

• Voice search is up 6 times
• 40 million songs were recorded on the Les Paul Google doodle

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All around us, the web is enabling an explosion of “remix culture,” in which bits and pieces of text, images and video are cut and spliced to create new forms of art. Whatever you think of the specific outcomes of this process, it’s arguably a huge social benefit — and the principle of “fair use” is supposed to make that easier to enable. But as Kickstarter co-founder Andy Baio discovered when he put together an art project, “fair use” only applies if you can afford to fight for your idea in court — and if you can’t, you will fail. What does that mean for the future of the remixable web?

Baio, who is also a prominent blogger at Waxy.org, described in a long post on Thursday how he decided to put together a musical tribute to the jazz musician Miles Davis, by creating eight-bit — i.e., ringtone-level quality — versions of the famous album Kind of Blue. Baio carefully cleared all the licenses for the songs themselves, and even decided to donate the proceeds from the sales of his project (which was released last year) to the musicians who played on the album.

However, Baio didn’t get approval for the cover image, which was a pixellated version of the original photo of Davis, taken by the famous photographer Jay Maisel. After releasing his project — called Kind of Bloop — Baio got a legal claim from Maisel’s lawyers, who said his image represented copyright infringement. Despite Baio’s belief that the pixellated version of the image represented fair use, the blogger says he couldn’t afford to fight the lawsuit in court, and ultimately settled by paying Maisel $32,500.

[T]his is important: the fact that I settled is not an admission of guilt. My lawyers and I firmly believe that the pixel art is “fair use” and Maisel and his counsel firmly disagree. I settled for one reason: this was the least expensive option available.

As Baio’s blog post circulated around the blogosphere and on Twitter, it sparked a firestorm of criticism aimed at Maisel (which Baio tried to help snuff out). Eventually, that storm — which focused in part on the fact that the photographer lives in a 72-room New York landmark valued at $35 million — spilled over onto Maisel’s Facebook page, where hundreds of comments piled up accusing him of targeting a poor blogger. Part-way through the day on Thursday, the page was removed.

The fact that Jay Maisel is a famous and wealthy photographer (he actually bought the New York building in 1966 for $102,000) and Baio is just a blogger who helps run a startup shouldn’t have any bearing on whether what Baio did qualifies as fair use or not — but it does, because the only way to defend against such a claim is to go to court, since the burden of proof for fair use is on the defendant. And going to court is expensive.

It doesn’t help that the fair-use principle is complicated. There is no blanket “this is art” or even “this is a parody” exemption. Instead, the courts look at four factors — including the nature of the work (i.e., whether it is “transformative”) and whether it affects the ability of the creator to sell or license the original. Based on some of what Judge Pierre Leval has written about fair use, I — and plenty of others — think it’s pretty clear that Baio’s use was transformative. It altered the image both literally and figuratively for artistic purposes, and is unlikely to affect Maisel’s ability to license the original. As Baio put it:

Far from being a copy, the cover art comments on it and uses the photo in new ways to send a new message. This kind of transformation is the foundation of fair use.

But in the end, as Baio notes, none of that matters because he couldn’t afford to fight the case. Over the past decade or so there have likely been thousands or tens of thousands of similar cases — not to mention some in which home movies were removed from YouTube because copyrighted music was playing in the background — because no one wanted to (or could afford) to fight the case. And the result is that large entertainment and media entities get to dictate what is fair use and what isn’t.

This has a real impact on our society, as copyright-reform advocate Larry Lessig has said and written a number of times in his comments about the value of “remix culture,” including his 2008 book Remix. Digital content is so fluid that remixes and mashups of popular culture and mainstream content of all kinds have become a kind of second language, particularly for web-savvy young people.

My teenaged daughters, for example, experience almost every major news event via a video mashup of some kind — usually because someone makes a parody, as they did with the “Bed Intruder” and even the death of Osama bin Laden. This has become an integral part of how they experience media and content, and almost all of it is probably copyright infringement of some kind. Do we ultimately gain by stamping out that kind of thing with expensive lawsuits, or do we lose? I think it’s clearly the latter.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dawn Endico and Andy Baio

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With ThingLink’s new suite of what Engeström calls “rich media tags,” users can embed media from Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Twitter and more onto an image on their websites. It’s a significant improvement, because in the past tags could only contain links, which meant that users would get sent away from the host site.

Now it’s more pared down, providing an easy-to-use system that lets people add tags and hotspots to images. And as of today, the company is offering to embed not just text links to pictures but also audio, video, images and other material brought in directly from other sites.

“Now you don’t have to go away from the original image,” Engeström says. “You can discover all the things you need to know right there.” If you want to see what these rich media tags actually look like, here’s an example that incorporates all sorts of multimedia options:

Thinglink’s business is to help users build these images, let them tag and annotate them as they want, and then embed them on the users’ sites. The business so far has seen nearly 1 billion views of images created by around 3,000 publishers; the publishers are mostly individual bloggers but also include several large news organizations in Europe (business customers pay a fee for using the service, which gives them more support, access to data and the like).

For example the Berliner Morgenpost, a German newspaper, used Thinglink to enrich the haunting Situation Room image taken in the White House during the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden.

Engeström says the range of services that connect to Thinglink will continue to expand over the coming months and that the company is in talks to have its tools built-in to a number of different platforms. The service is already being adopted by several surprise sectors, and she sees more opportunities for expansion in other areas, too.

“It’s for everyone who has a vested interest in explaining the details of what they do,” she says. “We were surprised by the music sector, by how enthusiastically they took to Thinglink, and there is a lot of potential for educational use because it makes images really rich, which can be a fantastic way to learn about things.”

It’s easy to dismiss a service like this as a toy or perhaps as a feature of a bigger product rather than a stand-alone system. But that would be ignoring the power of images — an area that is starting to be radically redefined online. After all, only yesterday Google gave a bravura display of how important images could be in the future of information, showing off the new search by image feature. There’s a lot of life in this area yet.

And true, there are competing services that want to embed data inside images, admits Engeström — companies like Pixazza. But they have their eyes on short-term goals, she says, while her heart is in providing tools that anybody can use — and that can ultimately feed back into that early dream of being able to call up online information about any object in the world.

“The difference between us and anyone else described as competitors is that most image-tagging companies see images as a platform for advertising, because that’s where the money is,” she says. “For us, that’s interesting, but it’s not the most interesting thing. We see images as a navigational surface that you can use to create a rich experience. We’re not merely a tagging tool; we’re a future browser.”

Photograph used under CC license courtesy of Flickr user Nadya

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AVOS launched in late April with a headline-grabbing acquisition of social bookmarking pioneer Delicious from Yahoo, but thus far, its exact strategy has been tough to pin down. On its website, AVOS describes itself simply as “an Internet company” that aims to “help solve the problem of information overload.”

In a presentation at GigaOM’s Structure Big Data conference in March, Tap11 Co-founder Braxton Woodham described the startup as an “Omniture of the real-time web” that companies can use to track what’s being said online about their brands in real-time (check out the video below). Tap11′s technology tracks specific topic mentions on Twitter and catalogs the information into searchable archives that companies can analyze. Tap11 has expressed plans to expand to other social platforms, but as evidenced by its sale to AVOS, the company’s technology is pretty impressive as is: With more than 140 million Tweets being posted daily, sifting intelligence from Twitter’s firehose is no small feat.

Together, the capabilities of Tap11 and Delicious could allow AVOS to build an analytical dashboard that companies can use to monitor everything that’s being said about their brands on the web. Understanding public sentiment is the Holy Grail for consumer product companies– Procter & Gamble alone spends $350 million a year on market research– but even the most well-funded firms still conduct the majority of their studies offline with decades-old tools like panels and telephone surveys.

Recent deals such as Salesforce’s purchase of Radian6  and Google’s acquisition of TalkBin indicate the tech industry’s big players have just started to see there’s an opportunity to make a lot of money by helping bring the market research industry into the Internet age. With the Tap11 deal, AVOS may be setting itself up to compete with some pretty heavy hitters.

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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 reported by Michael Arrington.

Spotify continues to negotiate with Facebook over its long promised U.S. launch. But that isn’t the only thing the music streaming service has been up to. They’ve negotiated a number of deals with major movie studios to offer users streaming movies as well as music, a source in the industry tells us

That said, it does seem like a pretty sweet idea.

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