Forbes has an excellent article reporting one deliciously fast growing competitor to YouTube — a Paris production named DailyMotion.com that allows people to upload clips that have no limit (YouTube caps at 10 minutes) that has no advertising, and no obvious limitations to copyrighted material. As a result, people have been uploading full television episodes with abandon, and while it has a tiny slice of the YouTube pie (<1% compared to 65% of online video viewership), it is growing exponentially.

But its more than just online piracy writ large – the article goes into a few interesting tidbits, such as privately built online portals so people can find the exact links to where whole seasons of TV are found (five full seasons of Futurama? Fantastic!), the legality of such issues, how DailyMotion evades YouTube’s issues, and the real futility in getting DailyMotion to take down any videos at all.

I think the bottom line is that while all studios can partner with YouTube all they want, and they can pom-pom press releases about CBS’s success, ultimately what people want is free stuff.  As internet users get more savvy, YouTube will lose its cachet precisely because of the media restrictions that are placed on it.  Piracy, or rather, totally free episodes, needs to ultimately be viewed and considered as a strategy in and of itself as a way to drive interest and traffic.  Any efforts in stiffling media that wants to be viewed and shared, no matter what your legal or ethical opinions on the matter are, will ultimately be futile.

Well, no sense in rehashing what Amit’s already done a great job over. If you’re not watching the web as closely as you’d like, there are tools like Zaptxt, that outgoing TechCruncher Marshall Kirkpatrick mentioned yesterday, but its also important not forget good ol’ Google Alerts. It scans the interwebs for all kinds of news based on the keywords you leave behind — and now also scans the blogosphere. What I didn’t realize is that, of course, you can use the same tricks on your google search as you can with Google Alerts.

Amit over at Digital Inspirations goes through the gory details, but you can, for example, set up alerts so that you track news in a certain place. Interested in team Rocketboom, but only in New York? Try this query: rocketboom OR “andrew baron” OR “joanne colan” location:ny … yes, Google allows you to narrow searches using US States’ two letter codes.

Nifty!

If you’d like the details head over to Digital Inspirations for that any much more Google and other productivity related goodness.

Thanks to a site devoted to web2.0 skewering, sarcasm and satire, I now have a better understanding of Venture Capitalism (Matt Marshall, where are you?  There’s a great article that’s waiting to be digged dugg scaped reddited shoutited submitted somewhere — but then again, he’s probably not into article marketing so … )

Valleywag shakes off its thin veil of smarm to talk about different sources of investing.  Its broken down from VC’s, to hedgefunds, and angel investors and more.
Here’s how it breaks down personal credit:

• When is it healthy to run up a 20%-interest-rate debt on plastic? When it’s cheaper than running up a 200%-interest-rate debt on VCs.
• Of course, you could also rely on your own cash reserves, as many startuppers do with their second companies — Evan Williams, for example, who used his windfall from selling Blogger to Google to buy out the investors in his new company, Odeo.
• Ironically, credit card funding is a far cry from other way to borrow from banks…

Anyway, otherwise a nice breakdown for those of us not part of the industry.  Check it out.