I honestly tried to figure out how to take each of today's Picks and fluff them up, so they could stand as their own blog post. Unfortunately, you'd have noticed. Instead, in the true spirit of Pilgrim's Picks, these stories are news, just not newsy enough. It seems Viacom has finally found an online video home for Comedy Central shows The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report . Hulu is safe from the Viacom's IP attorneys. Kudos to Verizon, Sprint,

Over the last 3 years, UK internet traffic to blogs and personal websites has grown by 208%, according to new data from Hitwise . The web intelligence company has just released new data on blog readership in the United Kingdom which shows 1.19% of all UK web traffic flowed to a blog . )Not a single blog-that would be a great site to own-but to blogs in general( This chart shows just how much blog readership in the UK has grown' How does this compare with US readership?

Surely you didn't think Google would stop at YouTube when it comes to organizing for world domination the world's information? Last week, Google Analytics announced "AdWords TV Ads", an all-digital system that distributes advertisers' TV ads to participating channels nationwide. The service allows you to upload your TV ad as a video file to your AdWords account and, with a few clicks,

Over the weekend, I teased Pownce because it too proved to be as unreliable as Twitter. Well, with all the buzz the upstart Plurk is getting, I felt it only fair to share this with you. While I, and others continue to moan about Twitter's reliability. It's important to know that the grass is not any greener.

The folks over at Plurk must have some really good Karma. How else can you explain the incredible luck associated with rolling out your new micro-messaging )I can't bring myself to call it blogging( platform, at the same time your chief competitor )Twitter(, has hit the application scaling wall and is experiencing severe service outages? Any others getting tired of seeing a bunch of tweety birds lifting a whale? It was cute the first couple of times. Now? Not so much.

Oh, it's linky, and it's good. And it's Monday, so I know you need it. Unless it's Tuesday by the time you read this, I guess. Scrapers causing you indexing woes? Google Webmaster Central is here to help with a post on Duplicate content due to scrapers . No surprise: Carl Icahn and Yahoo are still sniping, with Icahn's latest letter insisting he does have a credible plan for Yahoo's future , and Google is leaving Yahoo in the dust. Welcome to the industry,

At the annual shareholder meeting a month ago, Google promised new YouTube ad formats that would be neither pre-roll or post-roll. Turns out " Buzz targeting " wasn't the only method they're implementing, at least according to an Ad Age article today: Professional content producers " those who come equipped with their own ad-sales teams " are now able to sell advertising on their YouTube channels.

We're entering our 3rd straight day of 100F+ temperatures in Raleigh! With this in mind, I'm hoping today's Apple announcements include a waterproof MacBook, so I can start blogging from the pool/beach. Here are today's Picks: Want to know the "happening" locations in your city? CitySense is a new service for Blackberry and iPhone that uses heat maps to show you where the "hot spots" are. Healthline has launched its own "AdSense for health sites" ad network.

It seems investors have been reading the National Retail Organization's suggestion that 55% of e-tailers want to focus more of their marketing dollars on widgets. After recently banking $50 million on widget maker Slide , VCs are back, this time investing $35 million in rival RockYou . The $35 million likely brings RockYou's valuation under fellow widget maker Slide's, which was $550 million in its last $50 million round from two private equity funds.

Hopefully you rely on Marketing Pilgrim to find the best marketing news for you. If you're monitoring news feeds yourself, you'll know the enormous amount of buzz/noise surrounding today's Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference. Here are three things almost certain to happen at today ' Apple will announce a new iPhone . Apple will announce a new Mac computer . Twitter will crash. OK, so maybe we'll only see 2 out of 3 coming true.

If you think Budweiser's TV ads have lost a little of their edge recently, you might want to turn off the "tele" and instead head online. That's where you'll find the company's risque "Swear Jar" ad. The video does contain bad language, but it's all beeped-out, so safe for work' Funny huh? How well is this video working for Budweiser parent Anheuser-Busch? Well, the video embedded above has 2.8 million views and a 5-star rating )from 4,706 ratings(, and 1,

So, like all Twitter users , I've been somewhat frustrated with the amount of downtime. As a back-up plan, I decided to go back to my Pownce account. Twitter has problems, but it's not alone. Look what greeted me on my attempt to add new friends to Pownce' FAIL! Pilgrim's Partners: Learn More From Your Web Form Submittals. Collect valuable marketing data w/ each submittal. Best Contact Form - Recommended by Andy Beal!

It's going to reach 100F in Raleigh today. That means staying inside is pretty much the only thing to do today. So, seeing as I'm stuck inside, I thought I'd share some weekend Picks. First up, Google has revealed the process it went through to come up with its new favicons: There were, apparently, a whole bunch of rejects: Anyway, it seems even Google's not married to the new favicons. It's seeking your suggestions too! OK,

When referring to the Google - Yahoo! - Microsoft triangle , one thing is certain: there will always be complaints: people complain about Google's domination, about Yahoo!'s services, about Microsoft's business practices and the list could go on and on. And, while everyone has the right to complain, one thing needs to be mentioned: these companies don't have to be fair! So Google is dominating the search industry?

Things are going from bad to worse between Yahoo and Carl Icahn . In Round 2 of letters this week, Yahoo and Icahn repeat many of the same arguments, but they're really getting snippy now. Sigh. I'm getting too tired of the ugliness to try to wade through and pluck out the "good" parts, but here's the gist of the interchange: ICAHN: Liar, liar, pants on fire. The employee "retention" plan is a walkout and a poison pill; sell to Microsoft for $34.

No surprise here. Google continued its dominance in the number one position of the top 10 search sites in the UK, with just over 74% share, according to comScore. eBay ranked second with 6 percent, followed by Yahoo! Sites )4.3 percent( and Microsoft Sites )3.4 percent(. Rounding out the top 10, U.K. properties, Rightmove Sites and Bebo.com claimed .8 and .7 percent respectively. Month over month, there was nominal movement in the stats.

What a difference a blog makes. Last Tuesday, The New York Times Bits Blog covered Google's efforts to join the Network Advertising Initiative )a group that sets standards in collecting data in advertising; DoubleClick helped to form the NAI(. The NAI requires members to link to their privacy policies clearly and conspicuously; this is usually taken to mean on the home page. Google refuses: Larry Page, the company's co-founder,

Two Three new partnerships for Yahoo to brag about today. First, Reuters reports the company has signed a web video partnership with CBS. The deal will have Yahoo join the CBS Audience Network, which already includes major outlets like Google Inc's YouTube, Time Warner Inc's AOL and Microsoft Corp's MSN, as well as sites like Joost, Veoh, and Bebo. Second, Yahoo will sell display ads on Walmart.com and will become the site's exclusive reseller of display inventory.

In 2004, the chilling video "EPIC 2014″ predicted that Google and Amazon would merge in 2008 and pretty much rule the world. Brace yourself, because Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay argues in a 310-page report that the video is becoming a reality. OK, he's actually predicting strong growth for Google and Amazon-and few others-but the outcome is pretty much the same. According to Reuters ' "We expect two players to continue to perform strongly,

How do you get online video viewers to interact with the clips they're watching? Well, if you're posting your video to YouTube, you can now use annotations . With YouTube's Video Annotations, you can: Add background information about the video. Create stories with multiple possibilities )viewers click to choose the next scene( Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video All of the above!