Over the past year, the amount of time American audiences spent watching video for the major live video publishers has grown 648% to more than 1.4 billion minutes, according to comScore. By comparison, the amount of time American audiences spent watching YouTube and Hulu increased 68% and 75%, respectively, over the same time period. The top live video publishers include Justin.tv, USTREAM, Livestream, LiveVideo, and Stickam. "Live online video sites have not only been successful in building audience, but also in keeping that audience tuned-in," notes comScore Web video specialist Andres Palmiter. As Palmiter notes, the average …

Less than a year ago, Digg was the single most important social site for a number of blogs within the Gawker Media network, including Gawker, Gizmodo, and Jalopnik. Now, it has been eclipsed by Facebook, Twitter and even StumbleUpon, according to MediaMemo, citing data from Gawker Media "marketing guy" Christopher Mascari. "Note that Reddit, Condé Nast's 'Digg clone,' is catching up as well," writes MediaMemo. Citing recent Alexa numbers, VentureBeat earlier this week noted that Digg and Reddit are now even in terms of page views, while Digg's bounce rate has taken a "frightful" jump of …

Both hugely ambitious company men, reports portray the relationship between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as increasingly close. Complicating matters, though, there was no sign of any Facebook connection on the iTunes-based social network that Apple debuted this week, due to what Jobs called "onerous" contractual demands. Sources now tell BoomTown that Facebook denied Apple access to APIs that would have allowed it to search for an iTunes user's friends on Facebook who had also signed up for Apple's new social service, Ping. "Normally, this API access is open and does not require permission," writes BoomTown. …

Every week, consumers view some two billion ad-supported videos on YouTube, and, according to The New York Times, a third of them are uploaded without the copyright owner's permission but left up by the owner's choice. "They are automatically recognized by YouTube, using a system called Content ID," writes The Times. Rather than kill the video, however, an increasing number of content owners have "decided to leave clips like this up, and in return, YouTube runs ads with the video and splits the revenue." As The Times notes, YouTube's new profitable relationship with content creators was not …

Twitter, which critics have suggested has already peaked, now boasts over 145 million registered users. "That's a lot, but how much is Twitter actually being used?" asks research firm Royal Pingdom. The Answer? "Turns out that there's more activity on Twitter than ever before, and it keeps increasing." Indeed, Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May, according to Pingdom. In August, meanwhile, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day. The increase is even more impressive within the context of the entire year. Activity on Twitter has already …

Following a buggy redesign and executive overhaul at Digg, some say the time is ripe for rival Reddit to take the social news throne. "Competitor Reddit.com started much later than Digg, and never really had a chance to catch up -- until now," writes VentureBeat. "Reddit is not only grabbing traffic from Digg in the wake of that site's troubled redesign, but it is also reporting a healthy jump in advertising deals and subscriptions." To boot, citing recent Alexa numbers, VentureBeat says the two sites are even in terms of page views, and that Digg's bounce rate …

Rapper Snoop Dogg is the new face of Norton's anti-cybercrime crusade. Under the tagline, "Hack Is Wack," Snoop is encouraging consumers to submit anti-cybercrime rap videos. The whole thing is beyond snark, really," writes Geekosystem.com. As one early submission spits: "Next thing you know, the po-po are knocking down your door thinking you're part of a cybercrime ring!" Entrants can rap about everything from hacking and identity theft, to computer viruses and the importance of protecting yourself from online crime. The winner will be announced on October 20, and selected based on overall creativity, rapping and …

In other Twitter news, before the year is out the top micro-blogging platform plans to begin recording and analyzing every link its users click. "All users" will soon be switched over to Twitter's t.co link-shortening service, after which "all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps" will use it, according to email announcement on Wednesday. "On these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click," the announcement notes. The news, writes CNet, "was soon met with a smattering of privacy concerns, with some Twitter users dubbing it a 'disgusting data landgrab' and others …

Sony might be struggling stateside, but it just scored a major victory in its hometown. In Japan, Agence France Presse is reporting that the Sony Walkman portable music player outsold the iPod in monthly sales for the first time since the iPod debuted in 2001. Sony's share of the Japanese market for portable music players stood at 47.8% last month, ahead of Apple, which had 44%, according to Tokyo-based marketing research company BCN. As BCN analyst Eiji Mori tells AFP, the result demonstrated "consumers' reluctance to buy iPods ahead of the launch of a new iPod range …

Twitter has launched its first official iPad app, and, by most accounts, it won't go to waste. More than any one feature, what stands out to ReadWriteWeb is "how the app fits into this growing trend that positions the iPad as the go-to device for consuming streams." Indeed, "With its touchscreen interface, the Apple tablet is ideal for both viewing and interacting with flows of information -- not just tweets, but also Facebook status updates, news, RSS feeds, photos and more." Similar to criticism levied against Twitter in general, however, ReadWriteWeb says its iPad app comes with …