Remember when Google was a proud member of the too-big-to-advertise club? Not so anymore. Last year's Super Bowl ad buy demonstrated that even the mighty search engine de tutti search engines is merely mortal after all. The company seems to be working against its own dweeby mythology and by trying to affect a more human appeal in its ads. But in a new set of viral video promotions for the Google Chrome browser, the kids in the lab are back in action ... and back in the lab. To coincide with a new beta release of the browser, which is …

Want to see every instance of Joy Behar taking a verbal nine-iron to Tiger Woods' sorry cheating ass? Can't get enough of Whoopi's funny stories? The new VIEWer's Choice feature for the daily women's talk show The View is taking video search to a new level of granularity. When tech dweebs like some of us think about search, we conform nicely to Google's regimen of keywords and phrases. We think ahead about how a search engine might think about a given set of pages and adjust our queries accordingly. But most earthlings do much different media searches in their …

All due respect to the superb journos at the Washington Post, but I can't imagine that in the midst of all your other writing and researching duties throughout the day, you relish worrying about how bad that bed head looks for all to see online. Starting last week, WashPo has recruited its writers to do online live video chats with readers from their desks. As Interactivities and Community Editor Hal Strauss told Beet.TV last week, the reporters at the paper have already gotten used to being part of the cable TV 24/7 news cycles where they do on-air stand-ups on …

Most hot tech companies get only one over-hyped product launch day per item. Sony's PS3, Nintendo's Wii, Verizon's DROID? One day, press sees if there are lines at the local store, interview some of the geeks with "Wii Rulez!" t-shorts, "more at 11" - move on to the next story. Apple, of course, is special. They don't get one over-hyped roll-out for the iPad. They get two. The lines were forming late in the afternoon at some Apple stores as the next wave of iPad shoppers sought their 3G.

In a letter heard round the Web yesterday, Steve Jobs posted what sounded like a break-up letter to Adobe. Its specific purpose was to explain the much-debated refusal of Apple to allow Flash-based products on its iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch platforms. But it sure reads like a steadfast note written by a former lover that both reviews and buries a relationship. "We met Adobe's founders when they were in their proverbial garage," Jobs recounts. Apple invested in and eventually owned 20% of the fledgling company. "The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good …

At this week's Media Magazine Outfront Conference, keynoter and Current TV Chairman Al Gore teased the audience with an offshoot of Current TV he called "Crowd-sourced TV." Without revealing much detail about the upcoming project, Gore suggested that the new service would leverage user-generated content in ways we haven't seen before to work with marketers, perhaps in crafting and distributing their messages.

For many small and medium publishers video has become in 2010 what images have been online for years, an indispensable way to make an article feel more compelling to the reader. Just as many bloggers and other publishers always rooted around the Google Image search engine to find just the right illustration for a text piece, now many of them are hunting around for just the right contextually relevant video to pull into a page. And of course the best source for videos on just about anything is still YouTube. The problem, of course, is that YouTube video embeds offer …

Last week Nielsen Games released some research about the degree to which games consoles are intercepting viewers from prime time TV. And it seemed to rattle media types. I am not sure why anyone would be surprised at this news though. It was Microsoft and Sony's plan all along, and it was brilliant. There are over 30 million Xboxes and Sony PS3s in U.S. homes right now, many of which are connected to the Internet and already pushing both long form and short form video into the living room. All of those "streaming media boxes" that came at us for …

While monthly video viewing in the U.S. may be showing signs of leveling off, the British market is in serious growth mode. According to figures released today from comScore Video Metrix in the U.K. overall video viewing grew 37% between February 2009 and February 2010, with more than 5.5 billion streams viewed for the month. The BBC more than doubled its videos viewed last year to come in second place. Each visitor to the broadcaster's site consumes 15.7 videos a month.

Well, at least I know that I am not alone. Netflix reported this week that it had a net increase of 1.7 million subscribers this year in the first quarter of the year. I was one of the 1.7 million. Netflix got me from all angles this quarter. The streaming Watch Instantly service was on my Xbox 360 and then on the PS3. But it was the iPad that sold it to me. As I wrote here last week, seamlessly synching my movie experience across screens so that I could take my movie to bed with me, is revelatory. I …