So as state-funded university tuition rises faster than the inflation rate, grants are becoming nonexistent, and students are actually looking abroad to complete their education cheaper and in half the time, Congressmen cozy with the RIAA are threatening to cut their funding more if they don’t play ball with the recording labels.

Happy Friday!  To mark the weekly occasion, we can tell you that YouTube appears to have been served with yet another lawsuit.  This time it’s Cal IV Entertainment, a country music publisher, that feels Google’s video-sharing site isn’t doing enough to protect copyrighted material.

We know that word of mouth is the best and most trusted form of marketing. Consumers love to hear from ‘someone just like me.’

Apple’s "Get a Mac" campaign was awarded The Grand Effie for the Most Successful Marketing Campaign of 2007 last night at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York.

When you hear about vigilantes, your next thought isn’t likely to involve Orkut, Google’s semi-popular social network.  Nonetheless, the contents of that site have spurred some Indian students to attack cybercafés.

CrunchGear blogger Seth Porges thinks the iPhone will bomb, and he makes a good case for it, even if it seems counterintuitive at first.

Search Marketing Standard’s Boris Mordkovich offered me a subscription to their magazine a few weeks ago. I was dubious; I mean really, a magazine printed on paper about the internet? Despite my reservations I am a shameless blog whore so I instantly said yes.

Paid content sites offer free trials to users hoping to turn them into subscribers. MarketingSherpa signed up for free trials with 50 content providers to explore what methods can be effective in attracting subscribers.

Peopleized is a new web 2.0 portal devoted to the social aspect of the Internet.

As rumors go, this is a pretty solid one: it seems that Google and Apple will partner, and together, the companies are likely to give .Mac a huge cloud-computing boost.

There hasn’t been something this fascinating and disturbing since AOL"s Data Valdez. Google’s Street Views feature on its Maps service raises a lot of questions about privacy, public domain, and humanity itself.