Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding and rescuing a US blogger). This has helped drive US Internet visits up further to the increasingly popular service. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.

Digg Dubb: Groove Is In The Heart from Trammell on Vimeo.
A new viral lip dub video has appeared (embedded above). This time courtesy of the staff at Digg. I would say it's a worthy follow-up to the video done at the offices at College Humor and Connected Ventures (see below). Revision3 has also joined the party with a lip bud video of their own (embedded at the bottom, gotta love INXS). Think about it, these videos are not just viral branding for the companies but also smart recruitment tools...

Online video is a hot topic these days with new entrants coming online (e.g. PluggedIn) and out of beta (e.g. Hulu) every day. We are seeing users spend a bit more more time with the video websites, spending an average of 16 minutes and 12 seconds for the week ending April 12, 2008 as compared to 15 minutes and 14 seconds during the same week last year. One interesting trend that I have noticed is that search engines and social networks are now accounting for an equal share of referred traffic. Last week (ending April 12, 2008) the share of upstream traffic from search increased 35% over the same week the previous year, while the referred traffic from social networks declined 20%.

Website operators who allow the posting of user-generated content on their sites enjoy broad immunity from legal liability. This includes immunity from copyright violations if the site owner registers with the Copyright Office, does not encourage the copyright violations and takes down infringing content upon receiving notice from a copyright owner (see our post here for more information). There is also broad immunity from liability for other legal violations that may occur within user-generated content.

A recent Reuters article discussed the missed opportunity by the music industry to capitalize upon searches for bands & artists that result in a visit to Wikipedia. A typical search result on a band or musician will display their own website, MySpace profile, and Wikipedia entry. For the majority of the most-searched bands & artists, these results are the most visited websites, with some variations in the rankings. A quick look at the websites visited immediately following a search for the top ten most-searched bands & artists for the 4 weeks ending March 29, 2008 shows that for 8 out of 10 of them, Wikipedia is more commonly receiving traffic from the searches than MySpace (although MySpace also ranks high for many as well).

From Future of Television Forum West – Joel Hyatt, co-founder of Current TV (with former Vice President Al Gore), said that their viewers by far prefer user generated so called "VCAM" ads over professional ads in his morning keynote.
“We have seen that 9 out of 10 of our viewers prefer user-generated ads over the Madison Avenue generated ads,” said Hyatt.

Following on from last week's post, Is Facebook on the decline in the UK?, I thought that this chart might be of interest. Facebook's market share of UK Internet visits last week (w/e 22 March 2008) was equal to its previous record high of 2.16% during the Christmas week (w/e 29 December 2007).

As someone passionate about travel and the travel industry, I pay a lot of attention to sites that are out there. Travel has long been an active industry online, whether you talk about people's behaviour with increasingly booking travel online, or the slate of review and opinion sites that let people share their opinions about travel destinations. From Yelp to Driftr to Dopplr there are new travel sites that let you do just about anything you want and they are all great ... yet none have quite found the right formula to harness the one thing that travel enthusiasts like me all have in common: a passion for talking about travel and sharing my experiences.

First, let me offer a great big thank you to Youtube from me and everyone on the internet, including many small businesses. Im just guessing here, but based on reports coming from Compete and others, I don't think its a stretch to say that Youtube subsidizes the cost of more than half the user generated internet bandwidth consumed in the United States.

This morning I was interested to see the thread on Techmeme's homepage about the success so far of Yahoo! Buzz. The RedWriteWeb story provides statistics on traffic from Yahoo! Buzz to some of the publishers involved in the Beta. ReadWriteWeb claims that Yahoo! Buzz "spells trouble for Digg". What do the figures show?

New York - AOL (NYSE: TWX) announced today that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Bebo, a social media network, for $850 million in cash. Bebo is particularly strong outside the United States, especially in Britain, and has a global membership of more than 40 million.

Rumors are circulating once again that Digg.com is up for sale, this time naming Google and Microsoft as likely bidders for the company. And while these may just be rumors, it makes sense why both would be interested – Microsoft already has an advertising deal in place with Digg and Google is already an inadvertent partner (and could also certainly sell advertising on the website).

Last Thursday, I spent the day at my first event of 2008 called the Social Networking Conference (SNC) in Miami to present a session called "Secrets of Creating Talkability." The event kicks of a string of speaking appearances I will be making over the next few months as I start to get ready for my book launch in March.