OT: Cosmo’s Bethany Heitman has a got a tip for Your Fabulous Life: you can save money on music through wholesale music piracy!

Heitman writes:

“Having new tunes is ideal, but shelling out the cash to buy said music hurts.

Call up friends, and ask them to burn you a CD of songs they think you’ll like. Tell them you’ll do the same. Once you swap, you can upload the CD onto your computer and add it to your MP3 player.”

Here’s a better money-saving tip: save money by not buying Cosmo.

Get all-you-can-eat free music from free music podcasts and from the zillions of musicians that are choosing to share their music freely on the Internet.

Stretta via Synthtopia

Internet telephony service Skype has announced a new version, Skype 4.0 Beta for Windows.

The new version focuses on improving video telephony features and offering better usability.

Here are a couple of videos that explain the Skype 4.0:

Mike Bartlett introduces Skype, and demos the new Skype 4.0 Beta for Windows.

Mike Bartlett demonstrates the advanced features of Skype 4.0 Beta for Windows.

Skype is popular with podcasters because it can be used to record digital phone calls.

No update for the Mac client has been announced.

twhirl, a desktop client for Twitter & Friendfeed, has been updated. It looks like it’s moving in the direction of becoming a general social networking client.

According to it the official announcement:

We took our time to make Friendfeed a lot more usable and add a few very nice features, including rooms support for Friendfeed, auto-throttling for reduced Twitter API limits, hiding old Twitter messages from previous sessions, system status notifications and much more. And, finally, summize.com search!

comScore today released April 2008 data from its comScore Video Metrix service, revealing that U.S. Internet users viewed 11 billion online videos during the month, with YouTube accounting for more than 4 billion of that total.

Other highlights:

• 71 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 228 minutes of video.
• 18-34 year olds were the heaviest viewing segment, watching an average of 287 minutes per viewer.
• The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.

Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 82 videos per viewer in April.

Mark Cuban has a must-read post over at Blog Maverick looking at Internet television service Hulu and Google‘s struggle to make its investment in YouTube pay off.

Cuban argues that Google made a billion-dollar mistake buying YouTube, and that Hulu is “kicking YouTube’s ass”.

It’s an interesting comparison, and one that may provide some insight into the future of video on the web.

A quick look at the two site’s reach suggests that Cuban is insane, and that it’s YouTube that is kicking Hulu’s ass:

While YouTube may have no problem giving away free services, though, Google hasn’t figured out how to make money doing it.

Cuban notes:

Hulu has one HUGE advantage over Youtube, it has the right to sell advertising in and around every single video on its site. It can package and sell any way that might make its customers happy.

Youtube on the other hand, has that right for only the small percentage of the videos on its site that it has a licensing deal with. For probably 99pct or more of the videos on the site, Youtube isn’t supposed to know what they even are.

Hulu’s selling ads on all of its content, while YouTube is trying to figure out how to make money off of laughing babies.

Internet TV startup Brightcove today announced the beta of its next-generation online video platform, Brightcove 3.

Scheduled for release this fall, Brightcove 3 is designed to simplify Internet TV, enabling the publishing of long-form, broadcast-quality content through websites without the need for proprietary software plug-ins.

“In the last three years we’ve learned a great deal about online video by working with major media companies around the world,” said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove chairman and chief executive officer. “The Brightcove 3 platform combines all the learning we’ve done with a range of breakthrough innovations.”

Information on the private beta is available at the Brightcove site.

FoxyTunes 3.0 for Firefox is a browser plug-in that turns any webpage with media files into a playlist that you can play right there on the page, without needing to launch a separate player. It also adds controls to the browser window for the most commonly used features in iTunes and other media players.

The latest version of FoxyTunes enhances any page that has music on it by automatically adding the Yahoo! Media Player to that page. This lets you directly play any track on that page or even the whole page as one big playlist.

Here’s an example MP3 file to test it with: NIN’s Discipline.

FoxyTunes is a free download from Yahoo! Music.

Alison and Lloyd of technology makeover show My Home 2.0 perform some innovative surgery on an old teddy bear.

The result: a teddy bear that reads your Twitter feed.

The Twittering Teddy also has a UStream channel, so you can tweet about something and then go watch a creepy animatronic teddy bear speak it on live streaming TV:

I’m not sure about this bear’s future as a toy – but it’s a great example of marketers using new media technologies, and creepy fun, too!

You can follow twittering teddy on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/Teddy2PointHome/

A survey of communications industry leaders suggests that customers now view high-speed Internet as more important than HDTV, digital phone service and other new technologies.

Research company Pike & Fischer recently surveyed executives, engineers and consultants representing the cable, telephone, satellite TV, broadcast, and technology equipment industries, along with academics and government regulators in the broadband spac

Survey participants were asked to rank several advanced communications services on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most attractive to customers.

• High-speed data speeds received more rankings of 5 than any other service. Nearly 40 percent of the respondents ranked data rates as a top draw.
• About 25% of participants ranked HDTV service as a 5.
• Digital phone service received the fewest top rankings. Only 9.2 percent of participants ranked it at 5.

With Hulu and other services already offering HDTV over broadband, high-speed Internet is rapidly becoming the primary platform for media.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced the release of its Digital Video In-Stream Ad Metrics Definitions.

The objective for the new document is to standardize the definitions of the most commonly used streaming advertising formats.

The document focuses on:

• Linear Video Ad With or Without Companion Ad
• Linear Video Interactive Ad
• Non-linear Overlay Ad
• Non-linear Non-Overlay Ad

“Metric definition alignment is one of the most important things that we can do as an industry to hasten advertiser adoption of digital video,” said Joey Trotz, Senior Director, Turner Broadcasting and co-Chair of the IAB’s Digital Video Committee.

To view the definitions, go to: www.iab.net/dv_metrics_definitions.