Apple has announced that it has surpassed 300 million iTunes U downloads in three years. iTunes U is an area of the iTunes store dedicated to educational content.

iTunes U includes content from Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, University of Melbourne and Université de Montréal. Users can experience university courses, lab demos, sports highlights, campus tours, and special lectures from participating universities.

Twitter has launched its official Tweet button for publishers to place on their content. There are numerous unofficial buttons out there that publishers have been taking advantage of for quite a while, but now there’s one right from the company that counts tweets no matter how they were tweeted.

Actually, Twitter is working with TweetMeme on this one. TweetMeme has been offering probably the most popular version of the tweet button for publishers. Twitter says TweetMeme will be switching over to the official Twitter button anyway.

Some major news organizations that make up the Internet Content Syndication Council are reportedly working on some guidelines for content syndication for their own collective membership, while providing an example for others to go by.

The council includes the Associated Press, Reuters, CBS, The Tribune Company, and many others. Here’s the full list of companies represented:

So-called content farms draw a lot of criticism for a supposed lack of quality and some consider them a threat to quality on the web in general. We’re talking about entities like Demand Media, Associated Content, the new AOL, etc. (the definition of the term content farm itself is also debated).

VigLink has acquired outbound traffic monetization company Driving Revenue, which brings over $100 million of merchandise transactions to the company. VigLink says this makes the combined entity the "definitive leader" in the space.

VigLink is a company that is backed by Google Ventures, Google’s venture capital arm. It’s a content monetization and affiliate marketing company aimed at bloggers. 

Meebo announced today that it has added EW.com and TVGuide.com to its list of publishers implementing the Meebo Bar. The Meebo bar is designed to let readers easily connect with the people they’re friends with on social networks. 

Content publishers are excited about the iPad and other tablet devices. Such devices provide readers with a new way of interacting with content. Print publishers, in particular, are hopeful that this kind of publishing can make up for some of the losses they have experienced on the print side.

Gather.com is a site that started as a social networking site, but is now a demand-driven media company, attracting 7 million unique visitors per month (and growing), according to the company. Demand-driven media is certainly a competitive industry these days with companies like Demand Media, AOL, Yahoo and others all playing their roles.

Google’s Blogger has teamed up with Zemanta to create a Zemanta Gadget for Blogger.

Zemanta CEO Boštjan ‘Bos’ Špeti? has posted about the gadget on the Blogger Buzz Blog, saying, "Previously, Blogger users could install a Zemanta browser plugin to recommend content while you blog, enabling you to read news to learn more about the topic, link articles to improve the value of your post, [and] use pictures to make you post richer."

Beauty and entertainment company Bankable, of which Tyra Banks is the CEO, has struck a deal with Demand Media, which will culminate in an interactive web property, an online video series and a set of mobile apps. Tyra Banks will also become a shareholder in Demand Media.

It’s been a while since we looked at one of the Google Q&A webmaster videos that Matt Cutts does, but I found this recent one particularly interesting, considering the emphasis that has been put on freshness in search engines lately.

How important is freshness to you as a search engine user? Share your thoughts here.

The user question in this particular video says: