YouTube has announced the winners of the YouTube Video Awards , which gives bragging rights and fame to the top user-created videos of 2007. It also notes they'll be invited to an event later this year - without details of what that will entail. As an aside I think this could be huge and more fun than the Sundance Film Festival. The un-stars could wear ridiculously normal clothes and walk backwards down a white carpet.

A controversial company in Britain is out to see everything you're doing online . And they are going straight to the source to find out - your ISP. They are about to partner with Britian's top ISPs )BT, Virgin and Talk Talk( to track every single action you take and use it to show you ads. The company, called Phorm , says they have access to the surfing habits of 70 percent of British households who have broadband.

I've been blogging about how traditional companies are putting more of their advertising budgets online and more local businesses are going online for the first time. Here's more evidence. General Motors is leading the auto industry in shifting their traditional advertising campaigns to online marketing . The third-largest advertiser will spend half of their $3 billion advertising budget online. They give it 3 years to get there. Last year GM spent $197 million online.

I don't know if this had anything to do with Shoemoney's cajoling but eBay is going solo and bringing their affiliate program in-house . They're calling it the eBay Partner Network and launched a new blog about it. As of April 1, 2008 the program will be dropped from the largest affiliate network - Commission Junction . They handle the reporting and pay affiliates in behalf of customers like Yahoo!, Home Depot, and Buy.com.

Yesterday at SES NY, Yahoo! partnered with Click Forensics to combat click fraud . Click Forensics will provide additional advertiser feedback to Yahoo! to help improve traffic quality for advertisers. This is significant because both Yahoo and Google hold a precarious position - wanting to please their advertisers by providing quality traffic - and their shareholders - by selling more ads. Both have argued that click fraud data is a lot less than Click Forensics has claimed.

The nonprofit Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization )SEMPO( surveyed over 867 search engine advertisers and SEM agencies to get a picture of the state of the search engine marketing industry. The 2007 SEMPO State of the Market Survey shows that contrary to worries about the economy, search engine marketing budgets have risen even higher than projected. That's the findings SEMPO is releasing today at the Search Engine Strategies )SES( conference in New York.

On the heels of completing their acquisition of DoubleClick this week, Google is releasing the beta version of Google Ad Manager . It's a tool for advertisers to manage their ad campaigns, including Google AdSense, and now, display ads from DoubleClick. Essentially with this tool small businesses can optimize and manage their ad inventory and see how its performing. And it will display Google AdSense as a default for unsold ad space.

YouTube has opened new APIs to allow more innovative ways to enhance and interact with YouTube content. This includes ways to integrate YouTube videos onto other websites, create desktop applications, video games, mobile devices, televisions, cameras, and more. In geekier terms: "We now provide a complete set of )CRUD( capabilities for uploading, managing, searching, and playing back user videos and metadata from the YouTube "cloud," managed by us.

If Viacom wanted to seek punitive damages for copyright infringement on YouTube , it's too late. Last week a judge denied a claim made by Viacom in their $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. US District Court Judge Louis Stanton ruled that Vicom will not be able to collect for punitive damages in the case. Originally, the case allowed for Viacom to add new claims for punitive damages. Now they can't. If any violations are found to be willful the penalty could be up to $150,

When someone suggested that Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M., release the band's new album "Accelerate" on the social networking site iLike - he liked the idea. The move will make history and is another sign of the music industry's loss of power. The entire album will be streamed on the site a week before it is released to the public on April 1st. Hopefully the servers will hold up. Music is social. Music is current and everchanging. And most of all,

An 18 year old freshman at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, could be expelled his first year of college because of a Facebook group he was the administrator of. Facebook started as a way for college students to network online and Chris Avenir used is as a virtual study group for his chemistry class. Now he faces charges of academic misconduct and could be kicked out of the university. There were 146 members of the group according to stories I read, but after searching,

Yahoo! has announced improvements to Yahoo Local Maps . They've added more data and made the maps easier to read. Yahoo says there are more changes to come, but here are some of the changes so far: New Neighborhood Data 300 cities with new neighborhood data added throughout North America, from Palo Alto, to Chicago, to Toronto, etc. More data in Eastern Europe New highlighted interest points like: schools, rest areas, ski resorts, etc.

Want to know what top brands are successfully using online video? divinity Metrics )with a lower case d( has started publishing their findings on their tool called Scope. It's called the Brand20 Index . How they arrived at Top 20 Brands using Online Video: indexed all the videos related to their client's campaign monitored millions of videos across multiple platforms in realtime looked at traffic, demographics,

"One of the largest online single events in the history of the Internet," turned into a news story about how it didn't happen. Almost anything Oprah Winfrey touches is a success, except online. At least on her first try. Oprah's first and much-hyped web debut crashed a few minutes after it started. Her apology is in the news today, and made me wonder if it's the first time Oprah has been mentioned in Information Week )and Marketing Pilgrim for that matter(.

February was a strong month for Google - the number of searches to the site was up one percent to equal 66.44% )to be exact( of searches in the U.S. I believe this is a new high, because according to HitWise, Google reached their highest share of searches in December 2007 - at 65.98%. Again Google takes the majority and the other search engines don't come close. Yahoo! Search had almost 21% of searches,

Rather than compete against Google on search, Yahoo is looking to find their niche by innovation on cell phone services. They announced a new bookmarking site for cell phones called OnePlace that will be released in a few months. The service goes beyond bookmarking by suggesting content related to the information you bookmark. The site is akin to del.icio.us but formatted to make it easier to navigate on small screens.

Not long after Google announced Google Sites , Microsoft announced that they will expand their enterprise-level software to small and mid-size business . Previously limited to businesses with more than 5,000 users, by this year businesses of all sizes will have access to Microsoft's email, online conferencing, and other services. The announcement came at the 2008 SharePoint Conference where Bill Gates described the changes in his keynote speech )see a live webcast here (.

In an effort to combine and expand offline market research with online market research, London-based TNS has acquired Compete.com for $75 million . Compete collects information about what people click on and their behavior online and compares it with your competitors. They also list your competitors top keywords that drive the most traffic to your site or blog )and it does this free(. Compete was founded in 2000 and is based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Affiliate Summit , a conference for affiliate marketers and affiliate managers, just ended in Las Vegas. I usually attend but I didn't go this year. Gary Marcoccia at AvantLink told me about a new affiliate tool that debuted at the Summit, that I wish every affiliate network had. AvantLink is a smaller network of affiliate programs. The tool is called the Affiliate Link Encoder )ALE( and it makes the process of adding affiliate links automatic.

Yahoo is changing the way they set minimum bids on paid search . Over the next few weeks they will set the minimum bid based on quality and value rather than how much you pay. The minimum bids will be set by individual keyword. Yahoo describes the change like setting minimum bids in an auction. So the more valuable, high quality, or demand there is the higher the starting bidding price is.