Soapbox was often referred to as a YouTube clone with stricter views on copyright.  It was responsible for only a small percentage of Microsoft’s overall video streams, and of course even that total doesn’t compare favorably to the numbers posted by sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Hulu.

So it makes sense that Erik Jorgensen, MSN’s corporate vice president and chief  media and technology officer, told Ina Fried and Stephen Shankland, "We have decided to shut down the Soapbox feature.  Beginning today, July 21, we will be notifying both our customers and our internal and external partners that on July 29th, people will no longer be able to upload videos to Soapbox and on August 31st, the service will no longer be available."

That should give users a reasonable amount of time to rescue their content, while also letting Microsoft cut its losses in the near future.

What’ll be interesting to see is whether Microsoft has some Bing-branded video offering in the works, or if the company will be content to let things stand as they are.

Best Buy Video Sharing is a subscription-based service for users to upload videos for sharing on Web sites, blogs, with family and friends, or email messages. The video sharing service lets users decide who can view their home videos and allows them to do so without advertisements.

The base plan for the service starts at $6.97 for 100 minutes of video hosting and videos up to 30 minutes in length. Subscribers can select premium plans for longer videos, additional storage space and other sharing features.

Best Buy Video Sharing was developed through a partnership with Mydeo, a UK based streaming video provider. As part of the deal, Best Buy has purchased a minority equity stake in the company.

"With the growing popularity of video, fueled in part by social networking sites, we’ve actually seen an increase in customer demand for alternative video sharing solutions. Many customers, particularly families with children, don’t want their personal memories available for anyone to see in the public domain nor do they want to share them in a cluttered environment that includes advertising," said Kevin Winneroski, vice president, Best Buy.

"Through Best Buy Video Sharing, customers can safely store their videos and share them only with the friends and family they choose."

“The overall strategy of Sohu is to be not only a news portal but also a big community – like MySpace,” said Charles Zhang, Sohu’s chairman, in an interview with Sophie Taylor.

And on that note, I’ll move on to Sohu’s list of accomplishments.  Now, when quoting companies’ statements, I often make fun of them – the claims can get kinda wild.  Yet Sohu’s description is largely accurate.  “Sohu has built one of the most comprehensive matrices of Chinese language web properties and proprietary search engines,” it begins.

The description then names “www.sohu.com, the mass portal and leading online media destination,” “an interactive search engine,” “the #1 online alumni club,” “a top real estate and home furnishing website,” “the #1 games information portal,” “a wireless value-added services provider,” and “a leading online mapping service provider.”

So, yeah, in terms of diversity, a video-sharing service will fit in just fine with the rest of Sohu’s offerings.  It will probably also measure up in terms of quality; Sohu is, after all, the company from which Google copied some data.

Reuters reports that “Sohu – ‘search fox’ in Chinese – like many others is trying to gain traction against heavyweights Google Inc. and Baidu.com Inc., which together command three-quarters of the search engine market in China.”  This new video-sharing site will probably help Sohu do precisely that.

Stanford Law’s Lawrence Lessig initiated the movement on his weblog, publishing open letters to both the DNC and RNC with 75 signatories, including Wikpedia founder Jimmy Wales, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, MoveOn.org and Arianna Huffington on the left, and blogger Michelle Malkin and RedState.com founder Mike Krempasky on the right.

Currently, the major television networks hold full rights to debate content, limiting the reach of the content as well as controlling what is done with it. Lessig and company feel the Presidential debates are too important face the barriers of copyright in an age of Internet video sharing on sites like YouTube and Blinkx.

The signers are pressuring the committees, especially the DNC, which recently announced it would sanction six official Presidential debates, so the committees can pressure the TV networks. Networks are notoriously heavy-handed regarding use (even fair use) of their content.

“The big TV networks should not be the only ones determining which sound bites are newsworthy after a debate," said Adam Green, MoveOn’s Civic Action Communications Director. "Everyday people should be able to put candidates’ positions on YouTube and share them with others without fear of breaking the law.”

“Technology has exploded the opportunity for people to comment upon and spread political speech,” said Lessig.  “I am very hopeful that both the Republicans and the Democrats will help encourage the extraordinary public discussion around the election that the Internet has enabled, by removing any uncertainty about the right of the people to comment upon the speech of presidential candidates.”

Lessig admits that many "rightly and fairly struggle over" copyright issues, the place of copyright in political debate is one more difficult to justify. In order to ensure a more genuinely participatory democracy, any network broadcasting the debates would be required to license them freely after the initial broadcast by putting them in the public domain.

"I am confident that I won’t like much of what this freedom will engender," Lessig writes on his blog. "But if that were a legitimate reason to regulate political speech, this would be a very different world."

Already dubbed "the YouTube Presidency," the 2008 election coverage has fully crossed all media. The Internet is living up to its potential as candidates and politicians post messages at video-sharing sites, and social networks like MySpace announce their own Presidential primaries.

That’s in addition to being the social network with the most unique visitors. The nearest competitor, Facebook, logged in only 171 collective years by users. Since time spent is next great indicator of value on the Web, Google’s failure to swallow up MySpace when they had the chance is looking to become one of the biggest oopses in Internet history.

What’s Google got in terms of social networking? Orkut? Great for Brazil, India, and, well, that’s about it. Both are large countries, but users haven’t devoted the time they have other networks. Orkut users racked up just under six years worth of time in March.

(It is kind of mind-boggling to think of years within months, isn’t it?)

That puts Orkut at number 8 on the Racepoint’s "Attention Rank" list, behind some networks you know, and some you may never have heard of: Bebo, BlackPlanet, Tagged, Classmates, and Hi5.

So, perhaps we can officially say not buying MySpace was a super, super dumb move. This may be why Google has seemed a bit trigger-happy with acquisitions lately – YouTube for $1.65 billion despite copyright concerns; DoubleClick for $3.1 billion (okay, not really a Web 2.0 company, but they are a strong contextual ad company).

But of course, the most painful part of this hindsight reality is that Google had to pay almost $1 billion to serve advertisements to MySpacers, rather than paying $300 million a smidge earlier to own it out right.

Oops.

We’ve also learned that YouTube and MSN, like Photobucket, owes a large portion of its success to MySpace. Not only is Photobucket the number one photo-sharing site on the Web (number one by a large distance), but its preference among MySpacers caused the site to receive 57 percent of its upstream traffic from the social network.

Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott weighs in again later with an update. Visits to Photobucket account for 73 percent of photo traffic leaving MySpace overall.

We may see some aggressive measures from MySpace in the photo-sharing realm then. Murdoch wasn’t thrilled at YouTube’s success on the back of his social network. That motivated Fox Interactive Media to launch their own video-sharing service.

Leveraging its own audience was another effective Murdoch decision. Now, according to Prescott, 2.22 percent of MySpacers travel downstream to MySpace Videos, compared to one percent to YouTube.

One thing’s for certain. Speculation on the potency of MySpace is moot, and Google really missed the boat.