DULUTH, Minn. – Wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, Mayor Don Ness strolled to the end of a dock jutting into frigid Lake Superior. He grinned, waved his arms to a cheering crowd, and jumped in.

“I’ve laid down the gauntlet!” Ness cried, shivering and dripping as he emerged from the lake in a video posted on YouTube. “All right, you other mayors! You want Google Fiber, you jump in Lake Superior!”

They may not be taking a lake plunge, but city leaders around the country are competing hard for Google’s experimental fiber-optic network, which promises to be more than 100 times faster than the Internet connections currently available to most Americans.

Topeka, Kan., informally renamed itself “Google, Kansas,” for the month of March. A group in Baltimore launched a Web site that uses Google mapping to plot the location of more than 1,000 residents and gives their reasons for wanting the service. Other cities in pursuit include Cincinnati, Portland, Ore., Grand Rapids, Mich., Rochester, N.Y., Baton Rouge, La. More than 200 groups on Facebook are pushing different cities and counties for Google’s broadband plan.

YouTube is adding captions to millions of Internet videos.The feature unveiled Thursday expands upon speech-recognition technology that YouTube began using to make captions available on a limited number of videos late last year.
YouTube’s audience will be able to request captions at the press of a button. Video producers will also be able to download the automated captions and improve upon them.

The adult-entertainment industry is in a tailspin, shattering the notion that it is one of the few recession-proof industries. The slump is especially stinging because technology — which helped adult-entertainment enterprises reap riches through innovations such as video streaming, webcameras and online payments — is contributing to the misery.

A handful of elements of Opera’s latest 10.5 beta still feel a little alpha — an oddly behaving button here, a small JavaScript control problem there. What’s really impressive, though, is Opera’s performance: Its graphics rendering is unbelievable. Chrome 4 had us already whistling on the Canvas geography map rendering test, with a 31.75 score. [...]

A growing number of software companies are capitalizing on an unexpected business opportunity: Internet censorship.

In countries where governments continue to ramp up Web filtering systems, more people are searching for tools that will allow them to access inaccessible information — and they are willing to pay for them.

Such tools include virtual private networks (VPN), proxy servers and other workarounds that enable users to breach barriers to blocked information online.

Can you believe it’s only five years old? In half a decade YouTube has changed the nature of online infrastructure, nearly caused a catastrophic policy change in the USA and given Google near-total dominance over an entire category of advertising. Now for its next trick: forcing standards-based video streaming on reluctant parties – like Microsoft.
The numbers on YouTube are just silly. In terms of users there is nothing to compare it with except the Google search engine, or Facebook, or Wikipedia. But those sites deal mostly in serving text or a couple of hundred million still images. YouTube streams well north of a billion pieces of video every day. That makes for an outrageous amount of data.

China needs no lessons about its Internet from the United States, the head of an online media association said through official media on Saturday after the United States rapped Beijing over information freedom.

A speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday showed a lack of respect for China, which cannot accept conditions on matters of “national security” or “social stability,” said Beijing Association of Online Media Chairman Min Dahong.

Silvio Berlusconi is moving to extend his grip on Italy’s media to the freewheeling Internet world of Google and YouTube.
Going beyond other European countries, the premier’s government has drafted a decree that would mandate the vetting of videos for pornographic or violent content uploaded by users onto such sites as YouTube, owned by Google, and [...]

YouTube’s coming attractions now include movie rentals.

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In October 2009, Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.4 percent search market share, up from 64.9 percent in September. Microsoft Sites grabbed 9.9 [...]