On average, a story making it to the front page of Digg.com gleans 129 links and generates over 10,000 visitors per hour to a website, or so say the experts at the SMX Social Media event in New York.

The House today voted 405-2 to extend the ban on Internet access taxes for another four years. The existing ban on Internet access taxes is due to expire on November 1.

The thought of Clear Channel Communications, all by its gigantic self, is enough to trouble some people.  The thought of Clear Channel teaming up with Google is even more worrisome.  Luckily, although the two have now formed a partnership, it’s a weak sort of deal at worst.

Tim O’Reilly has a great post up on O’Reilly Radar, in which he talks about what might be called (although he doesn’t use the term) the “stupidity of crowds.” Using the meltdown in quantitative hedge funds, Facebook apps and Techmeme.com as examples, he talks about how too many people chasing the same idea causes a decline in the value of that idea. As he puts it:

I missed the news over my vacation that Greg Linden was shutting down Findory on November 1, just 15 days away.

Search Engine Watch reported that Microsoft has added Search Engine Marketing to the services Office Live businesses can use to help grow their websites.

Google has finally unveiled their copyright protection system for YouTube. The reactions have been mixed.

Today Napster launched a new Web-based platform that allows users to listen to their music on their computer without downloading software.

One of the slams I saw yesterday after we started posting Google Reader’s feed numbers is that “nobody reads RSS.”

Today, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, gave us some more numbers so we can extrapolate out just how many people actually are using RSS.

First, let’s start with the BBC. That’s the #1 most subscribed to feed on Google Reader that I can find.

Thanks to a new deal between MySpace and Sony BMG, users of the social network should gain special access to streaming music videos, and other odds and ends, including limited audio content, may also become available.

The Associated Press has an article about Google and the fact that the company barely advertises, especially when compared with its competitors.

Users of Urchin’s software probably aren’t completely satisfied – the words “limited beta” are kind of a downer – but they’ve at least been tossed a morsel, as Google has updated Urchin 5.

At the SMX Social Media conference in New York City, panelists discussed the murky topic of social media sites, and how to draw traffic from them to your site.