Clips from programs like South Park and The Daily Show vanished from YouTube when Viacom demanded their removal. You wouldn’t know anything has changed based on YouTube’s rising traffic.

Newspaper giant Hearst Corporation unveiled its News Reader software, a product born of a partnership with Microsoft. News Reader software debuted in beta at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as a downloadable application, allowing an on-screen view of Hearst newspapers.

The news comes in the wake of growing concern for the future of print media as online content becomes more prevalent and preferred.

George B. Irish, president of Hearst Newspapers, and Kenneth A. Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media.

When Google Apps Premier Edition was released yesterday, it became the subject of more than a few news stories. Expect to see another round of them once a new deal between Google and Avaya bears fruit. Avaya has promised to integrate “communications” – e.g., voice – with Google Apps.

Neil Patel over at ProNet Advertising reports that Digg has, at least a little, pruned its list of banned domains, allowing a few of them back in, presumably on condition of good behavior.

At the top of Patel’s list is SEO Braveheart Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog, the banning of which ignited a digital flame war the likes of which haven’t been since the last time a freshman broke ranks in the lunch line.

 Blackberry’s recent "Share Your Stories" campaign was inspiring for me, though probably not in the way they intended.  I actually love my Blackberry, but their entire "Share your Story" campaign just struck me as lacking in any of the lessons many other marketers have learned about Web 2.0 marketing and what works in social media.

Press releases can be a great way to draw attention to your business. A well crafted piece with a catchy tag and good hook will get carried by many of the news organisations. And when that happens you can get some great coverage at little or no cost to your firm.

There has been a lot of publicity surrounding Google and Earthlink’s efforts to bring municipal WiFi to the city of San Francisco. With both the political and logistical snags that the companies have encountered along the way, however, should we start looking for an alternative method for delivering broadband to the masses?

“For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages.”

– The Google Team, 2004

According to Yahoo and Eurosport, a new agreement between the companies will create “Europe’s leading online sports news and community sport site.”

This Great and Magnificent Thing (which lacks a name at present) should come into existence in May, and rollout will initially be limited to the UK, Germany, and Italy.

Don’t be turned off by that slightly overblown description.

For a company to call itself or its product a leading something-or-other is pretty common, but there might be some merit to this claim.

Earlier this month, I wrote about the increasing number of subscribers to this blog’s RSS feed with numbers exceeding 1,000 for the first time.

It seems Digg has unbanned a list of sites by letting them back in. From what I have noticed here are the sites that have been allowed back in.

The New York Times Reader, a piece of software you can download to read the NYT on your PC, came out in beta last fall and I immediately downloaded it for a few reasons — including the fact that I am a geek, a newspaper journalist and a big NYT fan. And I have to admit that it was (and is) pretty slick. Thanks to Microsoft’s presentation software, it replicates the look of a newspaper, but updates itself when connected to the Web, etc.

As the word “paper” becomes less and less a part of the newspaper world, things like video are becoming more and more common. While there are some exceptionally well-designed video efforts out there — such as the Washington Post’s OnBeing, which I wrote about recently — there are also some that are, well… underwhelming, if that’s a word.

Google hasn’t had much luck in Europe holding on to its Gmail trademark, but we haven’t heard much in the way of a challenge in the US. A petition for cancellation filed at the US Patent and Trademark Office shows that it certainly hasn’t gone unchallenged.

Like many shareholders of Yahoo — whose stock has climbed somewhat in the past few months, but is still well below where it was at the beginning of last year — blogger and management consultant Eric Jackson has been less than pleased with the company’s performance over the past year or so.

Dear Kalena…