Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Coming off its first Super Bowl ad, Hulu.com, the joint online video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. that went live about a year ago, is beginning to stake its claim against the giants in the field. The video portal’s primary age demo has become the 25-to-34 crowd, but in January of 2009, it outpaced YouTube, on a percentage basis, among Web viewers in the 25-to-44 demographic. The Wall Street Journal (2/10)

This article is pretty interesting in its description of the current showdown between Hulu and YouTube.  Consider this, when I did a google search for “Hulu Superbowl ad,” the top link sent me to YouTube.  Does anyone else see the humor in that?

Twitter no longer is just an easy-to-use messaging service. The 140-character limit has led to creative uses of the open application, including home automation. A programmer set his washing machine to send him a Twitter message when a load of laundry is finished, and a Duke University student rigged his lights to turn on and off with a Twitter message. Wired (2/10)

@baby: food water  Twitter as the nanny…

Google appears to have a new obsession with knowing and broadcasting your current location. A week after announcing Latitude, which shares your location with friends on Google Maps and threatens to render several startups irrelevant, an engineer has developed location-aware email signatures for Gmail. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/11/google-brings-location-awareness-to-email 2/11)

Not sure how comfortable I am with constant location updates.  Sometimes, rarely albeit, I want to be anonymous.

Last October, Google signed a $125 million settlement with the Author’s Guild to pay authors for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web through its Google Book Search project. More than 7 million books have been scanned by Google so far, a large portion of them out of print. Today, the Google Book Settlement site went up, which allows authors and other copyright holders of out-of-print books the ability to submit claims to participate in the settlement. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/11/google-book-settlement-site-is-up-paying-authors-60-per-scanned-book 2/11)

Google is now making it easier for Websites to surface Friend Connect features with what it is calling the Social Bar. This is a toolbar that Websites can add to the top of their homepage or any other page they wish, and then they can add links for drop-down gadgets that lets site visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, or site members, all from Social Bar. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/11/google-friend-connect-introduces-the-social-bar 2/11)