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

She's got a small role opposite Lindsay Lohan--yes, the fresh-out-of-rehab tabloid target--in the Mean Girls actress' latest film, I Know Who Killed Me. It appears that Ms. Lohan plays a young woman who is rescued after being tortured by a serial killer, but it's unclear what Ms. Rose's role is.

(Maybe she's the serial killer?)

"I filmed my first scenes not long ago and was introduced to Lindsay, and from what I saw she is not how the press portrays her. In my opinion she seemed very sweet and funny and absolutely beautiful! Anyway, I am also going to be starring in the movie The Perfect Sport and I believe it'll be out by the end of 07 but thats not a promise!"

Is this blogfading? No. Are these blogging layoffs...yes, but why? Both blogs have impressive Technorati rankings. So why then? Where's the explanation from AOL? I feel they have an obligation to justify this decision. Actually I feel the AdJab guys should have been a little more upfront as well?

I gave up two years of my life writing about gadgets for this site. Waking up every morning at 5 AM, chewing up press releases to find the rare morsel of legitimate information, chasing down "hot tips" that ended up being photochops of iPods with reflections of genitals in the touchscreens. Oh, and the worst: fielding emails from PR parasites eager to suck away precious time in a half-hour phone meeting while the Senior Vice-President of Smoke Blowing tells me about how his company's software—based on an idea cribbed from Google—is going to change the way I look at something I didn't care about in the first place. (Inevitably, "forever.")

And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket to impress your friends and make you forget for just a few minutes, blood coursing as you tremblingly cut through the blister pack, that your life is utterly void of any lasting purpose.

What an idiot. I guess Johnson forgot who reads these blogs. They're not written for or by your average Joes. These are designed by and for tech and consumer electronics enthusiast who live to know about the latest new thing. Who consider it a badge of honor to try things out first, to suffer through bad design and ill-thought out products. All so they can tell friends family co workers, and especially the companies that make these products how crummy n--or great-- they really are.

In the gadget blog arena, Engadget and Gizmodo are the two elephants, surrounded by 10-12 tiger-sized smaller sites. The rest of the field is chock full of small foxes drying to get a piece of the adsense action.

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we've been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

Does Google Reader report subscriber counts?

Yes, Google Reader reports subscriber counts when we crawl feeds (within the "User-Agent:" header in HTTP). Currently, these counts include users of both Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and over time will include subscriptions from other Google properties.

The "User-Agent:" header of our crawler includes the name of our crawler ("FeedFetcher-Google") along with its associated URL, the subscriber count, and a unique 64-bit feed identifier ("feed-id"). You might see multiple requests for the same feed with distinct "feed-id" values. This happens if the same feed is referenced through multiple URLs (for example, because of redirects). In that case, you will need to sum up the subscribers to a feed that have distinct "feed-id" values to determine the total number of Google subscribers to the feed.

Below is an example of the contents of the "User-Agent:" header:

User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=1794595805790851116)

NoFollow = NoWorky. Using NoFollow in blog comments, the original intent of the tag, does nothing to discourage comment spammers. Using other anti-spamming tools such as question, math and plugins such as Akismet and SpamKarma for Wordpress is much more effective.

Since the use of NoFollow in comments on Wordpress blogs is default, many bloggers do not even realize they are using NoFollow.

To add insult to injury, they didn't even do a good job of it. They hotlinked the images from my blog and didn't bother to change the links (so I got the pingback notification.) If there's anything I hate worse than a plagiarizer, it's an incompetent plagiarizer.

Of course, when someone hotlinks an image from your site, there really is only one thing to do. (No, no, not that; I'm not that unkind.) I do hope they like the new images on their blog that have their Founder and CEO admitting to ripping off my blog posts, though.

Sometimes, I feel a little lonely on my Oscar blog. The solution: I take a rhetorical baseball bat to a fan favorite, "Borat," and hundreds of rabid commentators appear. Hey, I've got readers.

Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at The Times have never been more in touch with readers' every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care.

Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week's column, but maybe I'll write about, ah, blogging instead.

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism - letters to the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader, jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What about ... now? Hmmmm ... Now?

Now he is about to blow it all apart. Within the next few weeks, all of those little boxes (Krim calls them "modules") will become exportable as widgets to other Websites as well. "I love destroying what I build," he says.

It's Krim's way of contributing to the budding widget economy. Netvibes has 10 million active users, If you figure that each one has created at least five modules per page, that's a lot of potential widgets. Krim declares:

"Widgets are killing the Webpage. It is time to go to something else. We are entering the widget economy. We are going there no matter what."

Netvibes is also developing a Universal Widget API that will let widgets talk to one another and synchronize among themselves. And in April, Krim plans to add social networking features to Netvibes, such as the ability to subscribe to your friends' widgets or send them a cool blog post or video directly to their Netvibes page.

The second piece of news almost fell under the radar. Netvibes rival Webwag has quietly enabled a feature that lets users post widgets from Netvibes and Google IG to a Webwag page. They want to keep it quiet until the feature is officially ready, but I love the idea. Once all the startpages support the same widgets, how do you choose between them?

A beme is a turbo-charged meme made possible entirely by the existence of the network affect. A beme can be impactful because it is lurid--a photo of a panty-less Britney Spears, or humorous--a whimisical video of the band OKGO on treadmills, or gut-wrenching--the sad tirade by comedian Michael Richards. A beme can cement an idea with the public in a way that cannot be legislated or regulated. No legal effort by Cisco to enforce a trademark, for example, will make the public unlearn that Apple produces the iPhone.

A meme is old media, a beme is new media.

A meme takes off by accident, a beme by design.

A meme can take years to surface, a beme hours.

There are many culprits. First, we have a lot of third party widgets, ads and analytics apps running on the site. They are often the cause for slow load times. FM Publishing, our advertising network, often slows down the site and then other things pile on to crush it.

Today we had three problems. FM is updating their software and caused massive . We switched to the new version of wordpress which is clearly not bug free. And on top of that we have a number of plugins that are acting weird on the new wordpress software. One of them took us down earlier tonight.

Another culprit is MyBlogLog, which we've had to strip off the site a number of times because of slowdowns.

You won't find clips of comedian Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and MTV's "Pimp My Ride" on YouTube any more, but Viacom Inc. is laying the groundwork for its videos to be available to hundreds of thousands of other sites.

In the next few months, Web users will be able to grab videos from nearly all MTV-owned sites and post them on their own blogs or Web sites, lessening the need to go to YouTube (http://www.youtube.com), the top online video service that Google Inc. acquired last year.

Viacom, owner of MTV Networks and the Paramount movie studio, had been planning for this move months before it demanded earlier this month that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized Viacom video clips from its site, after failing to reach a distribution deal.

Viacom has not ruled out a deal with YouTube yet, while analysts say the dust-up is mere negotiating tactic. But Viacom also sees staying relevant to a new generation of media consumers as a top priority. To do so, they are borrowing ideas from the very companies they compete against.

The 2008 election will be the first where the Internet will play a central role, not only in terms of how the campaigns use technology, but also in how voter-generated content affects its course. TechPresident.com plans to track all these changes in real-time, covering everything from campaign websites, online advertising and email lists to the postings on YouTube and who's got the fastest growing group of friends on Facebook.

Our team of bloggers is made of veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, ranging across the political spectrum. Their expertise covers everything from website design to the latest in mobile tools and social networking sites. And we'll look closely not just at what the campaigns are or are not doing, but what voters and activists are doing online to independently affect the election.

Unlike most politics sites, techpresident.com will be the online equivalent of a trade magazine, aimed at political professionals who need to keep up with the Internet and technology executives involved in creating the tools they use. A group blog with a dozen contributors, it is an extension of Personal Democracy Forum, an online publishing and conference business owned by an Internet entrepreneur, Andrew Raseij.

Although Mr. Raseij has been a donor and adviser to Democratic candidates - he served as chairman of the technology advisory group of the Howard Dean campaign - he has recruited former campaign workers from both parties as bloggers. "When techies talk about technology, they tend to forget their politics," Mr. Raseij said.

Since the dawn of the Internet, one site has reigned over all others as the Web's official rounder-upper of the day's news: the Drudge Report. As anyone who works at a news website can tell you, the best driver of viewers to one of your stories is a link on Drudge. The second-best way is — there is no second-best way. For years, if a news story broke in the woods and Drudge didn't link to it, it didn't break.

Many, including such otherwise favored Web tycoons as Arianna Huffington and Gawker media's Nick Denton, have launched sites positioned as rivals to Drudge, but none has made a dent - until now. Welcome to Digg.com, the czar of social news - a kind of cross-pollination of Drudge and MySpace. The site's main function is fairly straightforward: Users post links on the Digg site to news stories. Other users look at the story and vote to either raise it up to the top of the site or bury it at the bottom.

Heard on the Runway, continuously updated online, offers news, images and analysis of this season's runway shows in New York, Milan and Paris from the Wall Street Journal's team of experienced fashion and luxury goods reporters. Our aim is to provide readers with a destination to discover the latest business news and fashion trends in and around the international runways showing Fall 2007 collections. New York fashion week runs from Feb. 2-9. We'll cover Milan from Feb. 18-26 and Paris from Feb. 25-March 5.

Only 27% of the public said they were satisfied with the news but 76% of people inside it are satisfied.

Only 12% of the public read newspapers but 26% of the industry reads them.

32% of the public get their news from Tv but only 5% of the media does.

40% of the public gets their news form the internet but 60% of the media industry does.

Just over half the public said blogs are important but 86% of the media said they are.

He reckons on more and more blogs: "We'll reach a new principle in the democratic experience - one man, one blog."

In between debating weighty issues like whether solo synchronized swimming is actually a sport or whether gymnastics really is fixed, the International Olympic Committee is looking at allowing athletes to blog.

It's a delicate issue. The IOC doesn't want to step on the toes of the traditional media, and there's a fear the athlete's village could turn into a battle zone of dueling blogsters.

Imagine Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis going after each other online before they meet on ice.

"We want to avoid a free-for-all situation," IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said.

But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the "ue" this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it's a good start on the Unix shell for mashups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be "text entities." You can solicit user input and build URL lines to submit to sites. The drag and drop editor lets you view and construct your pipeline, inspecting the data at each step in the process. And of course, you can view and copy any existing pipes, just like you could with shell scripts and later, web pages.

Creating a new Pipe, however, is not for the wary. The mere volume of available options to both expand and narrow down hundreds (or thousands) of pieces of data, combined with the seemingly endless array of (sometimes rather ambiguous) input boxes for each and every module in the pipe, is likely to be daunting for the novice user. Therefore, the service is not likely to be something that the majority of Yahoo!'s everyday users are going to use, but more likely to attract the early-adopting, slightly more technical crowd.

Because of this, Pipes may take off among tech geeks and have enough meme power to remain in the collective consciousness for a while, but may not be able to become a hit trend anytime soon. Content publishers may also become wary of Pipes altering their relationship with the end user by allowing users to manipulate, reformat, and ultimately alter content as they so please. Mishmashing content from all around the web sounds like fun for the user, but some fear that it could decrease brand awareness and reduce webmasters' abilities to track content usage patterns.

In a brilliant marketing move to kick this off, Facebook is donating the February net proceeds from the virtual gifts to charity. After that, they're keeping the money. I would expect this to be a significant revenue generator for them by year-end.

The reason I say this is because "poking" is already such a big activity on Facebook, where you reach out to other users. When you pay money to do the same thing, it will mean more, and people will be sucked into doing it. If and when Facebook launches premium gifts, people will be buying those, too. I'd also expect them to sell really high end "limited edition" icons as well in limited supplies.

Once you write enough blog posts, and read far too many blog posts, you acquire an instinctive sense for the principle ingredients of an audience-pleasing offering. However, rather than itemize those ingredients, it's far easier to discuss this magical formula in terms of the instinctive emotional responses you hope to conjure in readers. The broadest of those responses are indignation, titillation, stimulation, and affirmation.

The New York Times, the gray lady of establishment journalism, plans to begin posting user-generated video in March, an executive said Wednesday.

Speaking in a panel discussion at the SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York City, Times executive Nicholas Ascheim said that developing video content is costly.

"The most expensive thing is the journalists themselves. That's why user-generated content is interesting," said Mr. Ascheim, director of entertainment for video and audio at New York Times Digital.

The abolition of DRM would enable all MP3 users to access music from any online music store, including iTunes.

"This is clearly the best alternative for consumers and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat," he said in a statement on Apple's website.

Analysts said such a move would benefit Apple as the market leader in the digital music marketplace.

The innovative terminal will be presented to the Industry as a world first at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona from February12th (booth in Hall 2, D 06). The device uses the unique Polymer Vision rollable display technology which enables mobile devices to incorporate a display larger than the handset itself and offers a readability similar to printed paper. The product follows up on the rollable display technology based concept device Readius presented by Polymer Vision less than 18 months ago at the IFA Consumer Electronics Trade Fair in Berlin.

While smaller than a typical mobile phone, the new device features a display which extends up to 5-inches and may simply be stored away after use by folding it, thanks to the flexibility of the polymer based display material. The device features the largest display available in the industry for the same form factor, the 16 grey levels combined with a high contrast and high reflectivity display for paper like reading experience enables comfortable reading, even in bright sunlight. Future developments include colour and moving image capable display.

The Readius is the culmination of 16 years of research and I'm sure this device is simply the beginning, both for Polymer Vision and its competitors.

It took four years from the production of the first digital audio player, in 1997, to the first iPod, which kicked off the growth of the digital music market. The arrival of iTunes in 2003 brought digital music into the mainstream. Now commuter trains are filled with people plugged into their white earbuds while they flick through a newspaper. How long before they're scrolling through their emails and RSS feeds or reading their books on an electronic reader?

A little more than $1 billion, or one-fourth of all advertising online, went to Google's AdSense program in the third quarter of 2006. Of that, Google shared $780 million with those running AdSense. Approximately 3 million blogs now use AdSense, according to the blog-tracking site Technorati.

What isn't known is how that $780 million was distributed over those roughly 3 million blogs. But anecdotal evidence suggests that there's a majority making nothing, a sizable minority bringing in at least $100 a month, and a few making serious money.

Take an inside look at the teamwork, practice, disappointments and rewards of competing on an Intercollegiate Horse Show Association (IHSA) team in Delaware Valley College freshman Sara Gumbiner's Riding through College blog on EquiSearch.com.

Born in Somerset, N.J., Sara is working toward an equine studies degree, while riding on both the hunt seat and western IHSA teams and adjusting to college life. Follow the 18-year-old freshman as she attends tryouts, runs for a team officer position and rides toward her goal of competing with her team at IHSA Regionals and Zones.

So what does this all mean? After considerable internal debate and discussion with many of those who make up the Top Digger list, we've decided to remove the list beginning tomorrow. As for what's next, we're currently working on designing and refining the technologies required that will help enable our nearly 900,000 registered users to make real connections that we believe will greatly enhance the Digg experience – whether you're brand new to the site or have been on Digg since the beginning. We plan on rolling this out in the coming months along with features and programs that do a better job of rewarding positive contributions to the Digg community.

It's an exercise in futility. A competent programmer could easily throw together a page scraper to determine the top submitters, so when the dust settles, Digg will still have problems with pay-for-play, but the most prolific users will no longer be recognized by Digg for their work that makes the site so successful.

Exasperated by the failure to reach an agreement with Google and YouTube after months of negotiations, Viacom sent Google a letter today demanding that all Viacom material on YouTube-100,000 plus clips representing 1.2 billion streams, according to Viacom-be removed immediately. The clips span MTV Networks, BET and Paramount. Viacom wants a deal similar to those already reached by music labels and CBS. I'm not completely sure what the sticking points are on either side; Viacom and YouTube have managed a small marketing deal in the past but the media company also has made take down demands before. This, however, is the most sweeping.

It launched with approximately 800 internally created articles and 5000 articles that were ported over from the previous version. As you click-thru the site you will quickly realize just how empty it is and how many fact & category tags have not been filled in yet. Try playing with the random article functionality to take a spin through the site. The article pages are very nicely crafted. The tags are on the left. The article text and images take up the majority of the page.

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your favorite products; only you can tell us which ones they are

product information that comes from you, so that it might be more impartial and authoritative

product facts that actually matter to you (like shutter lag for cameras and fan noise for notebooks), not those supplied by manufacturers or sellers.