New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That’s big news, as it’s tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking is a market driver of serious proportions.

The Hitwise report puts Yahoo! as the source of 4.69 percent of traffic to online retail sites, MySpace as 2.53 percent and MSN search at 2.33 percent for the week ending August 26th. Google leads the pack at 14.93 percent.
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SynapseLife is a suite of integrated online applications for managing various parts of your life. The company is currently accepting email addresses for beta release notification on the first of October.

SynapseLife is the first consumer play of Synapse Corporate Solutions, a four person Seattle team founded by Daniel Rust and Mark Michael. The basic applications will be free with premium applications available.

There’s eight ajax applications scheduled to be in the initial release. A contacts manager, calendar, email broadcast tool, to-do lists, a financial ledger, a feed reader, favorites and tagging. All of the applications will be fully accessible by mobile device; there will be three versions of the site, a text only version for simple phones, a version with more graphics for PDAs and the basic browser version.

The contacts manager will integrate with the email broadcast service, for sending email blasts to groups of people. Emails will go out through SynapseLife but will have your regular email as the reply to address.

The calendar app will include the ability to create events and manage RSVPs – invitees will receive emails containing a link to a page for your event where they can provide information like the number of guests they’ll be bringing.
The RSS feed reader aims to be highly customizable and there’s an online bookmarking function. Content throughout the suite will be searchable by tags.

The company plans to release an API to allow other functionality to be added or for Synapse to be plugged in to other systems by third party developers. The personal applications described above will be free and users will have the option to pay for additional features aimed at small business and entrepreneurial needs. Those features will be based on the company’s legacy web service, which will be upgraded for the demanding Web 2.0 aficionado.

This is a great example of the kind of lightweight bundle of applications I expect to see a lot more of in the future. Yahoo! Mobile offers a similar but different feature set.

YouTube has opened a new section of its site called Colleges on YouTube. Students, staff and alumni of 30 universities can access video from their school community by using a .edu email address and other users can’t access those pages. Users are encouraged to suggest that their school be added to the list. This strategy has clearly been successful for Facebook, probably the 2nd most recognized online social network in the US with separate sections for more than 2000 schools. Just like Facebook is moving away from its initially closed nature, though, it makes little sense to me to see YouTube launching private sections on what was initially a viral video site. A closed college section is to the rest of the site like a suburban gated community is to a hip downtown scene.

I can’t help but think that a college section is appealing because it will keep out the freaks (and pirates) that make YouTube so lively. More Tea Partay, less 66Six. And thus more profitable advertising, in the short term at least.

The theory is that walled gardens for colleges make relevant content easier for insiders to find and less likely to be viewed by outsiders. In reality though, alumni accounts and the basic portability of data on the web mean that it’s not very hard to access the content and posting Facebook profiles elsewhere on the web has become standard gossip blogger practice. A degree of privacy on Facebook may be an antiquated idea from the days when online social networks were new. The .edu email login may be little more than an inconvenience to casual contact and collaboration – anyone who really wants to can get into the system. Things are changing at Facebook – its recent API release indicates that in some ways the company wants now to take the lead in opening up.

Creating closed sections of your site for large communities is not the direction the best of the web it going in. YouTube is known and loved not just as a site to upload videos, but as a place to find and spread video freely. Photosharing site Webshots demoted their College Live section from its own tab to a drop down menu item on the front page in this week’s redesign. Given that College Live rolled out in April, downplaying it in the end of August may indicate that it was a summer time experiment that wasn’t well received.

Webshots has said that video sharing will soon join photo sharing on its site. Hopefully Flickr and Zooomr will be next in offering video support. The line between photo and video is blurring, the line between inside and outside social sites is blurring – so why would YouTube draw another line around college users?

Though it was a trailblazer in user uploaded video community, the site is facing a growing anti-Paris Hilton (corporate influence) revolt and in this move seems to be moving backwards as well. Perhaps this fledgling section will wither on the vine or perhaps the freaks will move on to other sites.

Motion DSP is creating a simple web based interface that will significantly enhance low resolution camera phone video into surprisingly high quality stuff. It started off in 1998 as a U.S. military funded project at UC Santa Cruz. In January 2005, Professor Peyman Milanfar, the primary researcher behind the technology, co-founded Motion DSP.

The company compares multiple frames in a video to find and replace lost pixels in a given frame, significantly enhancing the experience with little increase in overall file size after compression. The service works best when a video is not moving rapidly or in a jerking fashion, but tends to improve just about any low quality video. To see a demonstration, check out this page on the site that contains three different before and after video shots.

The service will go into consumer beta sometime this year, CEO and co-founder Sean Varah told us. The service will be free and will allow users to upload a video and download an enhanced version. But he also stressed that the focus will be on getting deals done with the large online video sites, such as YouTube, to enhance user-uploaded videos.

Motion DSP is headquartered in San Mateo, California and outsource large parts of software development to Serbia. They’ve raised a $500,000 angel round and are currently pitching a Series A round of financing.

Faces.com is a social networking site from Australia with an emphasis on multimedia sharing. The site has been up for several years but has recently undergone a relaunch. Faces allows users to create their own site (like Myspace) or “widgetize” the data (photos, music, etc.) for placement on other sites.

Uploaded audio files are placed in playlists called TuneFeeds that can be shared with others or played in your profile page. There’s a browser toolbar for adding URLs to your favorites list and otherwise working with your account from off site. Desktop applications are also available for drag and drop bulk uploading and for automatically synching files from selected files with your Faces account. All the desktop apps are Windows only.

What’s most interesting about Faces, beyond its feature set, is the business model. It’s big on multimedia sharing and users are encouraged to upload a lot of pictures and music. Users seeking to exceed the monthly limits on upload (500 MB) and bandwidth (10 GB) can purchase a pro account for $25 per year. And then there are no limits to how much media you can put in your account or your visitors can play from your profile page. There will be advertising placed on profile pages and by audio in between every 4 songs played on free account user pages. The company says it will split graphic ad revenue with pro users and remove audio ads from their playlists. They say they plan on paying royalties to rights holders of the music – though I question how that’s going to happen if I’ve uploaded files myself! The offending music player is pictured here, complete with a title URL (tunefeed.com) that’s just a 404. Update: It turns out that the company is paying a licensing fee to act as a streaming internet radio station and no matter where a music file you uploaded to your profile comes from, they count each time anyone plays it as an instance of that license being used. They are also working on adding a music store that will let listeners purchase songs through Faces.

The seven person company has received a little over $2 million US dollars in private funding to date. Initial funding plus pro accounts plus graphic and audio advertising are where the money is coming from.

Photo editing and mobile upload are said to be pending, both of which would be very cool.

John Biggs over at CrunchGear wrote about an Israeli startup called Viewscore that aggregates product reviews of gadgets from around the web. He says it’s like the metacritic.com of gadgets. The cool technology here though is that the site normalizes numeric ratings across sites that use different scales (a number out of ten or up to five stars are converted to a score out of 100) and uses semantic analysis to determine a number for reviews that don’t use numeric ratings. All the reviews are averaged and viewable individually. You can compare prices and rate the quality of the reviews. There’s also basic information displayed about each product and a product comparison page for many gadgets.

Biggs, the CrunchGear editor, says the database of gadgets is pretty good so far. The company has told me that it intends to take its technology beyond gadgets but that this was the best place to start because there are already so many gadget reviews online.

In related meta-review site news, the multi-topic review search engine iNods (see Mike’s review) released their 1.0 version today.

There’s so much content available online these days that quality aggregation of it with some good added value on top is an important service to provide. I think there’s a lot of room for more entries into this space.

Video site Guba, one of the most interesting players in the space, has released an affiliate program that will pay you 25 cents for every new free (US based) account resulting from a clickthrough of an embedded video on your site. The video doesn’t have to be your own, it just has to be embedded on your web page or blog. Registering for an account lets users upload video, leave comments and subscribe to videos by tag. It’s an intriguing move because account signups themselves make Guba no money. The free video pages don’t have ads on them but are set up to drive people to the low cost premium videos for download to rent or buy.

Guba previously made the news for offering video downloads at a much lower price than competitors, creating a product that hunts copyrighted video online and landing some of the first online distribution deals with major movie studios.

Other startups paying users in the online video space include Revvr and Flixya, though both of those companies are offering 50/50 revenue splits of the AdSense revenue generated from their video pages. That model has its charm and could work well for sites with big stars (like some of the users on YouTube) but seems less appealing for most users and in Flixya it could encourage people to upload video they don’t own so they can profit from AdSense around it. In one sense I’m not sure how different this is than paying people for referrals via embedded video they don’t own (Guba), but that seems more legitimate than wrapping AdSense around someone else’s YouTube video on Flixya.

Guba’s move is a real gamble though. As long as there is no advertising on the video pages, free accounts will not directly generate any money. The site’s business model seems to be based on driving people to the premium downloads section of the site. One day rentals cost between 49 and 99 cents, purchase from five dollars to ten. Will the revenue generated from sales and rentals alone make up for the free accounts that Guba pays affiliates for? Is it a desperate move to generate publicity in the face of YouTube’s huge mindshare in the market?

I think it might work. I think people will display Guba videos and their viewers will sign up for free accounts. I think people want video on demand and a large enough number of them may well use their friendly new neighborhood free video site for premium access. I think this is a great use of startup money and is really ties together one of the smartest online video strategies out there. Now if there was only Mac support!

Google is adding a feature to its Google Books service today to allow PDF downloads of out-of-copyright books. For example, to download a pdf version of Dante’s Inferno, see the right sidebar of this page.

Until now, Google only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online (and only snippets of copyrighted works). To search the database of available full titles, go to books.google.com and click the “full view books” option when searching. This new move contradicts earlier statements by Google that scans of out-of-copyright books would not be made available for printing.

Many full view titles, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, don’t have the PDF option yet.

Project Gutenberg is already offering downloads of thousands of out-of-copyright books, although the formating is inconsistent and the interface is less than user friendly.

Dave Winer has turned his attention to making mobile content easier to deal with. If you are the kind of person who’s always reading websites on a mobile device and curse the slow load times, complete lack of formatting, and other problems, you’ll want to save a few of these bookmarks on your phone.

Check out NYTimes, BBC and TechCrunch in Dave’s new, stripped down format. I’ve been reading TechCrunch this way on my phone for a couple of weeks. Most of the graphics and (sniff) all of the advertising is stripped out, but at least it keeps the reader sane.

Dave isn’t the first to create mobile versions of websites. Winksite, Skweezer and Google, among others, have their own products. Skweezer is particularly cool because it converts any website on the fly. And in some ways its better than Dave’s sites because it also shows comments on a blog, and throws in the advertising, but at the very bottom. This is important to keep the site owners happy and also to make sure you aren’t violating copyright laws.

But if you want to just store a couple of quick bookmarks for a daily read, Dave’s solution may be right for you. See Om Malik’s thoughts on this as well.

And tomorrow look for him to announce a new mobile blogging tool called YoMoBlog. Go to the site, type in your blog credentials and create a quick post on the fly. All of the major blogging platforms offer the ability to post on a blog via a unique email address…but if you are on a smaller platform this might be a good tool for you to use.

As usual with Dave, his first iterations are just tangible reflections of his imagination. He builds and launches software fast, then goes back and fills in the holes. Look for these tools to evolve as well, and hopefully stay on the right side of copyright law.

Microsoft’s long awaited contextual advertising platform, named ContentAds, sent out the first invitations today to prospective participants in its pilot program. Starting on “primarily” (their word) MSN owned sites, Microsoft says that ContentAds will place advertisements using not just keywords but also demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools. Sounds like AdSense plus some consideration of the demographics of various MSN sites’ readership – we’ll see what happens when ContentAds are released into the wild. We’ll probably see soon.

More big time competition for Google’s AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network and the other players in the field should mean higher revenue cuts for publishers and more innovation in the way ads are served. That’s the theory anyway, though Microsoft’s late and safe entry into the game leaves open the question of whether there will be much innovation here. Come on Microsoft – surprise us!

Online ad expert Jennifer Slegg, who got an invitation, broke the news (I found via) and predicts Microsoft’s entry will be especially good news for small publishers without millions of impressions per month.

Microsoft announced what was probably a huge advertising deal with Facebook just last week.

Update: Microsoft’s Don Dodge is of the belief that this new ad product will have better click fraud protection than Google or Yahoo! That would be very cool.

CNET owned Webshots, a massive property with 420 million photos, relaunched moments ago with a new interface and a number of feature changes.

The most notable changes are to the limits on photo uploading. Free accounts are now able to upload 1,000 photos plus an additional 100 photos per month (the additional photos are applied retroactively and continue to accrue even if not used). Premium accounts, which are $30 per year, allow for 5,000 initial photos plus 500 more per month. Photos are archived at original resolution, and resized for presentation on the site only if larger than 2400×2400.

In another notable move, Webshots will be allowing users to upload video to their webshots accounts starting in September. Video will be transcoded into Flash video for viewing on the website. Our long-time opinion has been that photo sharing sites needed video as well, to allow people to store vacation and other photos and videos in a single location. Look for this feature eventually on Flickr as well.

Our previous coverge of Webshots is here.

Look for a post on the Flickr Blog later today announcing that 1,234,384 photos were geotagged in the first 24 hours after the new feature launched yesterday (159 of those were mine).

Flickr Geotagging, which allows users to drag photos on to a Yahoo map and mark them with a specific worldwide location, received rave early reviews yesterday, even from competitors. After testing it myself I found it incredibly easy to go back and geotag hundreds of photos with very little effort. Congratulations to the Flickr team.

Flickr continues to rock along, with 4.5 million registered users and 17 million unique visitors per month. They have just under 230 million total photos uploaded and 900,000 new photos are uploaded daily on average.

In a move that could lead to some fascinating collaboration, Apple just announced that Google CEO Eric Schmidt has joined its board of director. As the battle heats up between Google and Microsoft for online services and between Apple and Microsoft for media (not to mention computing) this is an important move that signals an alliance between the companies. Schmidt is now the eighth member of the Apple board.

Google just unveiled its first formal move towards an online office suite Sunday night. Everyone is watching to see how Apple will bring new media content online through iTunes and the company already dominates the portable media market. Could close collaboration between online giant Google and Apple hardware pose the most viable threat yet to Microsoft’s long held personal computing leadership? It certainly seems possible. Google alone is frightening enough for Microsoft. One way or the other, this could mean exciting things in the future. Granted, you’ve got to give a nod to the “Google is Evil” perspective and this budding partnership might end up being awful – we’ll see! I at least can’t help but be intrigued.

Yardbarker is a social news site focused on sports. You could call it a Digg clone, but there’s more here than that. Even if it is a Digg clone, it’s a particularly good one – and there’s no reason why the basic premise of socially moderated news shouldn’t be built on and targeted towards niche audiences. In fact, I think it’s a good idea and this site does it well.

Yardbarker was co-founded by Mark Johns (founding engineer of Ophoto.com), Peter Vlastelica, Jack Kloster and Jeffrey Kloster. The company is based in Berkeley, California.

The site has sections for a wide variety of US sports, from the NHL to the PGA, and is prepopulated with player and team names so you can create watchlists for individuals, groups or franchises. This watchlist feature is great, it’s essentially a search feed but is very nicely implemented for usability.

Users can submit and vote on news, write their own “columns” (blogs essentially) and create watchlists of players, groups or teams to track. You can also track the articles submitted by other users and send them messages inside the system. The site is nicely laid out, has sports trivia running along the top of most pages and is a real pleasure to use.

When you submit a story one of the fields you’re given is for player and team names. The auto complete function here creates a nice system of categorization so it’s easy to read one article about a particular player and then with a single click see all the other articles about them.

The site uses Ajax nicely throughout, including to switch from a post’s short summary to the long version and on the player and team menu sidebar. It’s got a good feel to it.

Now for the downsides. There are many sports included on the site, but when I type in common women’s names the auto complete strikes out. Second, there are no steps taken to prevent duplicate submission of stories. This may make sense if multiple people want to post original editorial content regarding that story, but it may also make the site unable to scale without getting cluttered. There’s no bookmarklet for submitting a story directly from off-site and no direct RSS feeds if I want to get the most popular hockey stories or comments left to my posts in my feed reader.

There’s a lot of potential here, but it will also be a challenge to build a user base. How many other sports communities online are thriving? Fox Sports Blogs seem to be doing alright but I’m sure they wish there were seeing far more activity, Markos Moulitsas’ Sports Blog Nation seems to be getting some traction with users but is much simpler in format. ArmchairGM is a sports wiki that gets a fair number of changes, another bit of evidence that content and discourse online about sports is in demand. There are a lot of sites aggregating sports content and many allow user comments, but a Digg clone with user blogs and watchlists like Yardbarker takes things to the next level.

I do think that social moderation of news has a lot of potential outside the tech world – clearly even Digg thinks so as they’ve added more sections than tech. I’m not sure it will work for every niche but sports may be a good one. Sports writing and reading is accessible enough for many people to engage in but is complicated enough for particularly smart people to really excel. The competition in this space could be steep, but I like what Yardbarker is doing.

Sorry to horn in like this, but we have a little contest going on over at CrunchGear.com that you might enjoy. Here are the rules.

The concept is pretty simple: take your picture holding up a sign with your own name or a sassy saying and then pass that sign to a friend and have them take their own picture THEN have that friend pass it on to one of their friends, ideally someone YOU don’t know. Simply repeat this process and try to grab a great long chain of folks. The entrant with the most links in the chain wins the Motorola Q and the entrant with the coolest pictures – maybe they’re taken very artistically or they include a celebrity – wins a Kodak Easyshare v603 camera.

Feel free to stop by and potentially win a nice phone or a great point-and-shoot camera. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Web 2.0 hoo-haa.

Six Degrees of Crunchation Contest

After four months of private beta, Windows Live QnA (Question and Answer) opens to the public today. There is no shortage of question and answer services online, it’s almost becoming a requirement for portals. If the number of users is important in such a service, though, then the Live offering may be particularly appealing as it ramps up.

The service is a whole lot like the popular Yahoo! Answers, which is growing as much as 35% per month. The primary differences being that Live QnA uses tags instead of categories and offers more sophisticated alerts via MSN Alerts. Tags will make the site much easier to explore by clicking through other peoples’ terms of categorization instead of a stab in the dark full text query for terms similar to your own. The service is only available in English so far, but the Live team says to be patient – more languages are on the way.

Yahoo! Answers offers a watchlist on your dashboard page, which is convenient. It also launched an API two weeks ago today, so developers may come up with some interesting uses of the data. Yahoo! Answers has also got a very loyal user base already. Note also our coverage of an Israeli startup in this space, Yedda, which launched earlier this month.

Live QnA isn’t listed on the front page of the Live.com site yet so if you want to see it you have to go directly to its page, qna.live.com. There are many startups in this space, some with innovative models like compensation for answers. Until one of those models better proves itself, it makes sense for Live.com to offer a straight forward QnA service with the addition of tags.

If you’re familiar with this story, see the updated details at the end. Universal Music, the corporate parent behind labels like MoTown, Geffen Records and many more, announced this morning that they will be making their entire catalogue available for free download through New York based startup SpiralFrog.com starting this fall.

SpiralFrog will offer free downloads wrapped in a still undisclosed form of digital rights management technology. How tired. Executive bios indicate the company has been around for more than two years, but we’ll see if they were doing anything more than lining up big names for their corporate roster, music partnerships and advertisers for the site. How about coming up with some workable alternative to the pathetic state of DRM with two years of work?

Music lovers have been demanding a different business model for some time, and it looks like at least some industry heavy hitters are going to give it a go via SpiralFrog. We’ve profiled several independent sites experimenting with new business models for music lately (Amie Street, Sellaband and Magnatune) but you had to expect the big guys to try something more traditional. See also eMusic, low cost and DRM free.

The CEO of Spiral Frog, Robin Kent, was former CEO of advertising firm Universal Mccann. Their CTO, Vesa Suomalainen, was an executive at Microsoft for 12 years. SpiralFrog’s management and directors is made up of a long list of big media execs, like Frances Preston (former President and CEO of BMI) and Jay Berman (former Warner representative to the RIAA). SpiralFrog told the Financial Times that they were in talks with Warner, EMI and Sony-BMG as well. This is clearly big media’s attempt to try free downloads driven by ads, but it’s still caught up in DRM!

Is there any chance that the ads will generate enough revenue to cover the costs to be incurred? Perhaps if the site is high profile enough there is. High end clothing retailer Perry Ellis is already lined up to advertise on the site. Sounds like a gamble to me, but we’ll see.

Update with details: I just got off Skype with the fantastic Neville Hobson (see FIR), who’s doing PR for Spiral Frog. He wasn’t able to convince me that this was really a compelling service, but he did provide some juicy details.

Spiral Frog will offer a desktop downloader for Windows Media Files (no iPods!) that can be listened to on one PC and two portable devices. Here’s the kicker – you must log in to the Spiral Frog service at least once per month, and see their ads, or your files will stop playing! The details aren’t fully set in stone, but it will be something like that. There will be links to third party sites of the record labels’ choosing if you’d like to buy your freedom to at least skip the ads.

Spiral Frog will also offer far more than just music, but also video and other digital content. The selling point here is that users will be able to access media legally, without the malware, bad network connections and pirate’s shame that comes from other online media sources. Weird Al’s new “Don’t Download This Song” must be linked to in reference to those arguments!

It will be an exciting day if the major labels come up with something truly more compelling than piracy on one hand or coercion on the other – but I don’t think this is it.

Yet-to-launch Podango, based in Salt Lake City, is trying to corner the podcast market by aggregating popular, topic-specific podcasts into expert-driven channels. The goal is to combine multiple podcasts, which may only be publishing weekly, into a 3-5 shows per day channel with a single RSS feed. Just like old-style television and radio stations.

Podcast directories, like those created by Yahoo and iTunes, are very popular ways of finding new, good podcast content. Podango wants to take this a step further and mash the talent up into topic specific channels, taking some of the work out of finding good content by listeners. If they are successful, look for the established players to quickly follow suit.

Podango will recruite station directors, who in turn will recruit podcasters for their channels, manage the channel using an Ajax drag and drop admin interface, and help recruit advertisers. The hope is that listeners will gain from having a person select the best podcasts for a given category as well as avoid dead air time since shows will be queued one-after-another. Podcasters will gain an audience. Station Directors will have a chance to make “$25K to $250K a year or more.” Of total revenue, Podango will keep 30%, leaving 70% for station directors and individual podcasters.

If this works, I’ll be signing up for sports editorial and their equivalent of Comedy Central. Hurry up and launch, Podango.

A screen shot of how a channel will look is below.

Yahoo unveiled its new Real Estate site today. The site now incorporates an interactive map displaying home price data filtered by location, price, and number of beds and baths. It draws its data from MLS listings, classified, foreclosures, and rentals. Yahoo has also fully integrated with high-profile and massively funded partner Zillow by using their technology to power a home value mashup with Yahoo maps. The new site will make life more difficult for the myriad of competing real estate websites, including newcomers such as Redfin, Trulia, Movoto, and RealEstateABC.com.

With the redesign, Yahoo supports finding and listing a house, researching the area (schools and community), finding a realtor, getting a mortgage (with local rates), and valuing your home. This makes for a far more comprehensive site than the price listings Trulia provides, yet doesn’t go as far as Redfin and Movoto by stepping in as the broker (note, however that these last two services are restricted to just a few geographic locations).

Old school search company Lycos will announce this morning that it’s partnering with video search company Blinkx to power video search on Lycos.com. The video search feature is available now. Everybody wants to nail down video search these days, but Blinkx has some interesting technology. This is the second move by Lycos we’ve reported on this month – new giant email rivaling Gmail’s storage was the first.

Blinkx stands out because it indexes not just text metadata but also the spoken word in video footage via speech recognition. The company reported this summer that it’s now indexed more than 4 million hours of audio and video content. Thus the new Lycos video search page also includes the option to search audio content as well. It’s a lot like Podzinger but for international video, with an emphasis on educational content. Blinkx CTO Suranga Chandratillake told me today that if it’s Brittany Spears you want then it’s Brittany Spears you’ll get at Blinkx – but if it’s a particular phrase being used by Condaleeza Rice on TV, then Blinkx’s technology is really what you are looking for. Just search once and subscribe to the results feed, because you don’t want to go back more than once to the site until it undergoes the redesign Chandratillake tells me is coming. (The UI is injurious.)

Google Video isn’t actually a Google (search the web) for video, Chandratillake says, and so Blinkx seeks to be. I like Blinkx’s search results, I’ve subscribed to several feeds from them for some time and I go to them every time I want to do news video search. I hope that the emerging importance of video search will propel them, or someone with similar technology, past the world of trashy content and marginal partnerships. Perhaps this deal with Lycos will be a good fresh beginning in a new era when video search is believed to be important.