The internet is a transitory place, but you can generally rely on web pages hanging around for a while. Text and photos don't start disappearing from online articles at random. Google is aggravatingly good at storing every little bit of information about you that's ever made it online. But when it comes to web video, it seems you’re in luck if a clip lasts the night.

We see this all the time in our posts; as soon as something takes off, like the anti-gay Christian rock prank1, or Brizezilla of "Wig Out" fame2, or the recording of an insane skydive accident3, the video we're using to help tell a story disappears. Sometimes that's because the content is copyrighted and not licensed, sometimes the creator has a beef, sometimes the clip is deemed inappropriate.

Although I'm certainly not the only one who has been aggravated by the increasing appearance of the "This video is no longer available" message from YouTube, I didn't know how to quantify my frustration. So I decided to do a little test... do you remember Pitchfork's 100 Awesome Music Videos post from last summer? There was a brief moment where these types of posts opened our eyes to the potential of a new form of curatorial criticism of video, with a mashup of moving illustrations that were controlled by users. Suddenly, you could image whole new ways to conceive of writing about the history of visual culture. Now, just months later, that vision has been practically erased, as over half of the clips from the above post have been removed from YouTube -- to be exact, 54 of 100 are gone (I counted). I try not to be polemic about these matters on this blog, but I find it hard to believe this is good for anyone -- artist, label, critic, fan, and, especially, the marketplace of ideas.

Web surfers will no longer be reliving the magic moments of the 2007 Oscarcast via YouTube. The vid-viewing site complied with a Tuesday request from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to remove all unauthorized clips of the kudocast.

Several segments of the show, including host Ellen DeGeneres' opening monologue and musical numbers featuring Will Ferrell and Beyonce, had been among YouTube's most-viewed content this week.

Ferrell's musical lament about how comedies never win Oscars, sung with Jack Black and John C. Reilly, had racked up more than 250,000 views on YouTube before it was replaced with the message "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences."

Ric Robertson, exec administrator for the Academy, said the organization had its content pulled "to help manage the value of our telecast and our brand."

The official Oscar.com Website, which is run as a joint venture of the Academy and Disney's ABC.com, features a five-minute clip of highlights from the three hour, 51 minute broadcast. That footage, along with "Thank-You Cam" videos from backstage, are preceded by ads.

But Robertson said that the ads weren't a factor: "Even if Oscar.com didn't have clips, we would have asked YouTube to take remove the excerpts."

Recently a new blog was launched by the General called the Cadillac Drivers' Blog. We've gone through all the posts that have been published since the site quietly went live on January 31st, and they're an interesting read from the perspective of Cadillac engineers charged with testing the luxury marque's prototypes out on the open road.

The inspiration for the site appears to have come from the very spy photographers these engineers are tasked with avoiding at all costs. The lengths to which spy photogs will go to catch a glimpse of what these engineers are doing made them think, "Why not let people see a bit more of what we're doing?" Why not indeed. Currently the posts focus on testing for the 2008 Cadillac CTS, both in the suffocating heat of Death Valley and the arctic cold of Michigan's upper peninsula and the Kinross facility in northern Sweden. Who knows why the Cadillac Drivers' Blog was launched, but credit must be given to the engineers who author it who seem to enjoy escorting us readers into their world.

Back in November, Denton was rumored to have hired Eurotrash's Geraldine "Delly" Hayward as editor, a fact that he refused to confirm—with good reason. The blog, under the codename "Girlie Gawker," has finally resurfaced with a different editor, whispers of a not-too-distant but still unspecified launch date, and a mission: capturing a female audience in the flyover states, sources say.

At the helm of the lady-centric site will be Anna Holmes, a former In Style editor and Entertainment Weekly scribe who is solidly entrenched in the chick-lit world. In 2003, she edited Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters From the End of the Affair, a historical survey of scorned and bitter femmes that O Magazine called "cathartic."

But I defend their position on banning the exploit poster, Shoemoney. I think he crossed the line from white hat to black hat when posting the identities of several community members. I think banning was the right thing to do, even without a Terms of Service to cover their ass.

Impersonating someone online is a kind of identity theft, and on a site where you're leaving traces of yourself, a kind of digital "Kilroy was here", using the names and identities of other community members to make a point goes fairly powerfully against the intentions of their product.

1) Tracking outbound links is what caused us to launch MyBlogLog in the first place. Ads are outbound links.
2) This feature was added after users requested it over and over...
3) This is not a Pro-only feature. Free users can look at their stats page and under "What Readers Clicked" they'll see "Filter by: All | Ads | Content".
4) Google has acknowledged this feature (without protest). And, as opposed to the click-through data that Google gives its customers, this info generated by MBL is collected independently of the AdSense program which doesn't appear to be considered confidential information under their terms of service.

The reason? Based on a conversation I had with Digg founder Kevin Rose recently, Digg thinks they are winning the war over the problem of "grouping" behavior (where groups of Digg accounts are controlled or effectively controlled by a person or group and can push stories to the home page). The changes they've made to Digg over the last few months, Rose says, allow them to monitor grouping behavior and stop it before it can drive a story to the home page. Thus, there is no real need to ban any particular site from Digg. They are confident that if a story from a previously banned site makes it to the home page, it deserves to be there.

"Through a series of highly sophisticated and complex algorithms, this system has determined that you are not presently authorized to use this system function. It could be that you simply mistyped a password, or, it could be that you are some sort of interplanetary alien-being that has no hands and, thus, cannot type." (See screenshot on 2nd page of this post.)

But wait, it gets even weirder:

"If I were a gambler, I would bet that a cat (an orange tabby named Sierra or Harley) somehow jumped onto your keyboard and forgot some of the more important pointers from those typing lessons you paid for. Based on the actual error encountered, I would guess that the feline in question simply forgot to place one or both paws on the appropriate home keys before starting. Then again, I suppose it could have been a keyboard error caused by some form of cosmic radiation; this would fit nicely with my interplanetary alien-being theory."

Audible Magic started out making software that CD duplicators use to verify the copyright status of discs they're about to manufacture. If you go to a duplicator and ask them make 10'000 CDs, they're going to first run it through AM's Replicheck software to make sure you've got the rights to your content. This works because AM has two key advantages.

1. Every significant music distributor (and now film and video, too) sends its content to AM to be logged into the database. So AM's database is always up to date with millions and millions of files to compare.
2. AM has (and has continually improved) "fingerprinting" technology that can recognize that content, even if you ripped it at a different bit rate, removed the first ten seconds, or recorded it off a jukebox at a bar.

One potential snag in implementing the company's technology at YouTube is that the database of audio for movies and television shows is incomplete. "We have to have access to all the television and film content to be able to fingerprint," Ikezoye said.

"It isn't that complicated of a process," he added. "It could be done in months."

Meanwhile, Audible Magic is also working on a way to compare video images themselves. Ikezoye said that service should be ready later in the year.

The news that Google was ready to start filtering, however, was greeted with skepticism. "YouTube and Google have been promising filtering tools for many, many months, while the damage to copyright owners continues," a spokesman for Viacom said.

"You've got this wonderful, imaginative hateful stuff that comes flying out. I think one of the most important takeaways is - it's the classical line - not only should you not believe your own press, you probably shouldn't believe your opposition blogs either."

"I think politics and political coverage has become so polarized in this country...because it's the Internet and the blogs that have really used this White House's press conferences to somehow support positions out in America, political views. And they will clip and digitize portions of these briefings to fit into their particular argument."

The shot of Aniston, 38, was not included in the final version of the movie, which earned more than $118 million at the box office.

The lawsuit, claiming copyright infringement and filed in U.S. District Court, said Lavandeira "posted all or parts of the stolen footage from the motion picture on his Web site."

The suit seeks an injunction barring further distribution of the picture and requests a court order "directing the U.S. Marshal to seize" the copyrighted material from the 28-year-old blogger.

There was no response to an e-mail message to Lavandeira seeking comment on the suit.

We set a NEW traffic record yesterday.

According to our Sitemeter statistics, we had 5.38 million page views and 4.75 million unique visitors on PerezHilton.com on Monday.

And it was a freakin' holiday in America yesterday with many people out of the office!!!

Do you remember those things that we called Blog Networks? You might have paid attention or you might have went about your life like nothing changed and that's one of the reasons why they failed. 'Failed' might be a harsh term to use, but of the hundreds of blog networks that started in 2005 and 2006 which ones are thriving and by 'thriving' I don't mean staying above surface?

But why did they fail? Were they just cool because anyone could start one and it was a sweet buzzword to associate yourself with for a while? It is not that hard to understand why they didn’t live up to the hype that they created for themselves.

For the first six years of the century, the dream of building a technology company and taking it public was out of reach for all but a few lucky entrepreneurs.

Getting bought by a company with deep pockets (like Google (Charts) or eBay (Charts)) became the norm - and with the exception of a few standout startups (like YouTube or Skype), even that endgame didn't produce eye-popping returns.

Get ready for a tidal shift. Judging by the number of companies that have already filed or indicated that they might, 2007 is shaping up to be the biggest year for initial public offerings in the tech world since the end of the dotcom bubble in 2000.

In fact, the Business 2.0 article reads like something out of a magazine you might find in a hair salon or at the supermarket checkout, with headlines like "Short skirts are back!" and "10 ways to tell if he's cheating!" and so on. Then we get the obligatory nod to the irrational exuberance crowd: "To be sure, smooth sailing on Nasdaq is never guaranteed," the story says. Gee, ya think? And then it's on to the six companies that are "likely to strike it rich!" Terrific.

Not so, said C-SPAN spokeswoman Jennifer Moire. The videos on Pelosi's blog, called The Gavel, came from the House chamber, where the footage is shot by cameras owned by Congress, not C-SPAN.

"That's in the public domain, it's owned by the American people," Moire said.

Bloggers should always have a clearly outlined posting frequency. It does not matter if you post once a week, three times per week or every day as long as your readers are aware of that (in reality I advocate that if you are serious about blogging you should write at least 5 weekly posts, but that is not the central point of this article).

The problem is that most people have other activities that might disturb the normal posting schedule. Your family might need your attention certain times or you day job might require some extra hours of work on specific periods of the year. The best solution for those emergencies is to have some posts already written, just waiting to be published.

Steve Spendlove realizes that after last month's layoffs of most of the news-gathering staff at tiny KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa there will be less local coverage. The Clear Channel executive overseeing the station knows there won't be reporters to investigate local scandals, let alone do those fluffy woman-turns-100 features that make TV anchors cock their heads and smile at the end of a newscast.

But Spendlove said that the station's "business model" hadn't been working for years, and that "covering one-eighth of the Bay Area" is neither a moneymaker nor even an operation large enough to be measured by Nielsen ratings.

So the next step in Channel 50's evolution will be a nationally watched experiment in local television coverage. Over the next few months, the station's management plans to ask people in the community -- its independent filmmakers, its college students and professors, its civic leaders and others -- to provide programming for the station.

Will they be paid? That's being worked out. Who will cover the harder-edged stories? Some will be culled from local newspaper and TV online sites, Spendlove said, and "other sources" that are still being discussed.

Truth be told, Joost is nothing like YouTube. Joost is all about TV-length programming, although it can show shorter clips and even feature-length films. Most importantly, Joost is focused on commercial video content, not the user creations that have made YouTube so popular. To wit, you cannot upload content to Joost, making it a "secure" distribution medium in the eyes of many in the entertainment industry. Joost's founders don't have to deal with promises of filtering software or any of the other problems that stem from allowing anyone to "broadcast yourself (or someone else's content)." In this way, the two services are quite different.

This does not mean that YouTube and Joost are not competitors, however. The video advertising market online is very young, and a king has yet to be crowned. YouTube is undoubtedly feeling the heat, as the latest round of talks with Viacom ended rather poorly. Not only could the two sides not reach a deal, but Viacom decided that it would promote its own (Viacom-controlled) video sharing site and promote it vigorously. Similar responses from other major media companies could severely harm the site's ability to become a commercial success.

Tags are only part of optimizing YouTube. Keep in mind the influence that your title has in attracting CTR. You need to pull every lever to build an audience. The social nature of YT requires getting on users subscriptions and favorites. Again, it all gets down to quality. This is what inherently what makes YouTube great. You build attention by being incredibly interesting.

For me personally, there will be some change. For the first time in nearly a decade, I'll have a regular paycheck, benefits someone else pays for, and paid vacation. And TrueHoop will, I would assume, reach a bigger audience than ever. It will soon be moving to ESPN.com (although you will always be able to reach it at this address, which will redirect).

I'm very excited that TrueHoop is just going to be better than ever, honestly. Not to sound all cornball about it. But I really buy that. The timing here is perfect: I'm joining a respected mainstream media site with a massive audience, working alongside some professionals I deeply respect, just at the moment in history that mainstream media sites are really starting to appreciate the power of the blog. My job description is essentially self-created and it's my dream job--which I know because I have already been trying it out for nearly two years.

If this doesn't turn out to be fun, then I'm doing something seriously wrong.

"I don't have any groupies yet," said Ben Going when asked whether his Internet fame has changed his life. The 21-year-old waiter from Huntsville, Ala., has a regular YouTube audience that numbers nearly 26,000.

Two minutes after making his joke, Going was approached by two red-haired teenagers who asked him for an autograph. Going, known at YouTube as Boh3m3, shrugged at a reporter and appeared simultaneously thrilled and embarrassed. Lowering his hat, the one Going wears in many of his videos, he signed away.

"I watch you all the time," Eric Dutton, 14, from Pacifica, Calif., told Going.

Just two years ago, it would have been a curious thing for a 14-year-old Californian to revere a waiter from Alabama. No more. Dutton who spends two hours a day on YouTube, later said: "Boh3m3 is really honest on his blogs and he's naturally funny. Like the time he said he's never thrown a boomerang without it coming back to hit him in the head. That was hilarious. He thinks the Australians are trying to put one over on us."

What they have in common is a passion for communicating with the rest of the world via the Internet. Many of the top bloggers, such as DigitilSoul, TheHill88, and YourTubeNews, spend roughly 30 hours a week working on or watching YouTube videos. Frank Patterson, or DigitalSoul, is a 36-year-old, full-time father and part-time electrician from Pittsburgh.

One can think of the Web as a place where multiple overlapping global conversations are taking place simultaneously. To keep up with these conversations I have established my online home at Netvibes, which allows me to integrate almost all of the tools I use and organize them into different "tabs" in a way that fits with my online life. I have a tab for blogs and comments which allows me to track multiple online conversations, along with a blog search module that updates whenever somebody posts something related to the topics I am currently interested in.

Sites like Flickr that allow photo tagging make it easy to monitor the photos, and with new video services like Viddler, Mojiti, and Bubbleply that allow users to tag, comment, and create their own content within and on top of existing videos, it will soon be possible to be alerted the moment somebody uses a tag to describe any particular piece of an online video. On