Is it us, or are there tons of announcements about Web video recently? MSN and iFilm have teamed up; MSN will deliver iFilm video clips to MSN Video's free streaming entertainment channel. The clips will be refreshed in real time. MSN also inked a deal with Dennis Publishing to offer five video clips a week from Maxim. The video content will include photos, celebrity interviews, and music reviews.

Guess what? Women make up the majority of Internet users in the United States and their influence online is growing, according to a new report from eMarketer. The report, "Women Online in the U.S.: A Growing Majority," maintains that marketers need to organize their online efforts with women in mind because women comprise 51.6 percent of the U.S. online population. In fact, by 2008, women will account for 52.6 percent of total online users in the United States, according to eMarketer estimates. In absolute numbers, that means that in 2008 there will be roughly 10 million more females ages …

Talk about consumer-generated media. Apparently hackers have turned Sony's latest portable game player, the PSP handheld, into a device for online chat, Web browsing, and a venue for movies and music.

The only thing worse than returning from a week away, is coming back sick - and that is the Minute's minor misfortune this week. Some wretched rhinovirus accompanied me to Paris, looming just beneath the surface like a harpy waiting to swoop in for the kill. It landed with me at JFK and has yet to be properly quarantined and retired. So amid the snuffling (yes, it's a word) and coughing, we recall an airy pastiche of café crème, pastry, Picasso paintings, children sweetly calling, "Maman," walks along the Seine, and spring blooming in earnest, far earlier than in …

The first quarter ended last week with mixed messages for online advertising. The good news is that many market indications were up from last year. Yahoo! shares were up 8 percent relative to Standard & Poor's and Google shares were up 2 percent for the last two weeks of March, according to a report issued Friday by Merrill Lynch analysts Lauren Rich Fine and Justin Post.

Today, one week after Yahoo! said it would increase the storage capacity on free e-mail accounts to one gigabyte, Google came out with a plan to double the amount of storage it offered to two gigabytes, from one.

Today, the technology company United Virtualities has escalated the war between marketers, who want to know how their ads effect Web surfers, and consumers, who want to keep information to themselves. The company this morning proclaimed it has developed a new technology to bypass cookie deletions by consumers. The new method, dubbed the "persistent identification element," or PIE, is tagged to a user's browser and, boasts United Virtualities, is nearly indestructible: "PIEs cannot be deleted by any commercially available anti-spyware, mal-ware, or adware removal program."

The U.S. Supreme Court judges heard arguments in the Grokster case Tuesday, giving observers a chance to try to guess the outcome by interpreting the questions asked of the lawyers. But initial reports indicated that the Supreme Court was typically inscrutable Tuesday, showing skepticism about the arguments on both sides.

Two separate Web analytics firms moved in the market on Monday: WebTrends, acquired by NetIQ in 2001, went private, and Urchin Software Corp. was acquired by search engine giant Google. Terms of the Google deal weren't disclosed, but some commentators speculate that the company sold for around $30 million, while it cost investment company Francisco Partners $94 million to take WebTrends private.

What does the lowly 68-year-old copy machine have in common Grokster? Quite a bit, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Like Grokster, a file-sharing service that enables users to download copyrighted movies, the copy machine - which came about after law student Chester Carlson discovered "Xerography" in 1937 - also is capable of being used to violate copyright law.