It’s not at all unusual for someone to watch a half-hour show on television.  Then there are the hour-long dramas and much longer movies.  Gamers should get ready for a faster-paced TV viewing experience, however, as YouTube for Television has been introduced with them in mind.

Showing an example of how developers can do some really cool stuff with the Google Earth API, Google Earth iPhone Engineer David Phillip Oster has created a program that allows people to "surf" any region on the Earth’s surface using the balance board for the Nintendo Wii.

Oster used the Google Earth Browser plug-in and a javascript API, and the board transmits the person’s movements to the application using Bluetooth. See it in action:

Hitwise has released some data taking a look at search queries of holiday shoppers looking to locate hard-to-find gifts online. You know, those toys that are in demand. Every holiday season has (at leas) one. Once upon a time it was the "Tickle-Me Elmo". Last year it was the Nintnedo Wii. This year it’s…well, still the Nintendo Wii, among some others.

U.S. video game sales increased 28 percent in July from a year ago, with continued solid demand for Nintendo’s Wii console, research firm NPD said.

Sales of video game hardware, software and accessories reached $1.19 billion in July, with software sales increasing 41 percent and hardware sales growing 17 percent.

A UK based company called Peekaboo says it wants to create a pole dancing game for the Nintendo Wii.

"We are pleased to confirm that Peekaboo is in talks to develop a game for the Nintendo Wii that meets mainstream demand for the fun and fitness benefits of pole dancing," the company said.

U.S. sales of video game hardware and software increased 57 percent in March from a year earlier, according to a report from the NPD Group.

Sales of gaming hardware, software and accessories reached $1.7 billion in March with the Nintendo Wii seeing its biggest gain in a non-holiday month.

The U.S. in-game advertising spending will increase from $295 million in 2007 to $650 million in 2012 according to projections from eMarketer.

Video game software and hardware sales will increase to $21 billion in 2012, up from $15.8 billion in 2007. "At a time when other sectors of the digital entertainment industry are struggling with lagging sales and rampant piracy, the US video game business is booming," says Paul Verna, eMarketer Senior Analyst.

Nintendo has announced that it will begin charging Wii gamers for some of its online offerings.

Called the Wi-Fi Connection Pay and Play, the service will feature red stickers on the titles that users must pay to play online. A pricing plan has not been released but Nintendo said that gamers could pay for titles using Wii points, the consoles virtual currency.

Research firm the NPD Group has released its U.S. retail sales figures for January 2008.

Software sales for the month were up by 11 percent to $611 million, hardware sales dropped by a quarter to $378 million. Overall the industry was down 6 percent for the month managing to reach $1.18 billion compared to January 2007 sales of $1.25 billion.

Strong holiday sales of Wii and Nintendo DS portable game device allowed Japan’s Nintendo to more than double its quarterly operating profit and to raise its outlook ahead of market expectations.

The Nintendo Wii can help develop surgical skills according to Kanav Kahol and Marshall Smith of the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

The two have found that surgical residents performed better during simulated surgery after playing on the Wii console. They say its due to the console’s "Wimote" control system, which allows players to direct on-screen action using a wireless remote that is sensitive to acceleration in three dimensions.

Apparently the Queen of England has become a fan of Nintendo’s Wii console.

The British tabloid The People reported that the 81-year-old became interested in the Wii console after seeing her 25-year-old grandson Prince William play a game.

The scarce Nintendo Wii ranked as the most searched-for item during the holidays, while Ugg boots drew the most luxury item queries.

Nintendo holiday sales of the Wii game console are off to a "fantastic start" according to a top executive with the company.

What brands are the most popular with the Digg audience? I did a little research to gather some data so I can figure out what brands are mentioned most on Digg. What I did is I looked at the number of times a story with the brand name in the title, description, or URL has appeared on the Digg homepage in the last year.

Nielsen//NetRatings says that more than one third of US adults online, 36.5 percent own a game console, and another 15.9 percent own a portable game console. Game consoles have become popular with all ages and are considered to be a major part of America’s home entertainment systems.

When it comes to who owns consoles, 71 percent are married and 66 percent have at least one child in the household. Because of video game ratings from the Entertainment Software Rating Board, home video games can be entertainment for the whole family.

From the desktop to the mobile, even to the Nintendo Wii, Opera Software’s free networking site offers its users several points of access.

Searchers looking for last minute gifts for the special someone, researching the origins of Valentine’s Day, and music enthusiasts soaking in the coverage from this year’s Grammy awards comprised the majority of Google queries last week.

Besides television, radio, Internet and newspapers where do you get your news? Would you consider using a game console to receive your news? That’s what Nintendo and the Associated Press are hoping.

A glut of web searches for the Nintendo Wii has made it the most desirable gadget for Christmas, surpassing the perennial iPod for the top spot. To emphasize this point, the Wii was launched in the UK last week and it sold all 50000 of the available consoles in 12 hours, making the sale rate for the Wii at 1 console sold per second.

The site consists of a combination of Flickr photos, del.icio.us links, Yahoo MyWeb, Yahoo Games, and other Wii-related offerings. This is the first of many more Yahoo sites to come that will focus on niche content that revolves around a particular product or brand.