links for 2009-03-06

"After Perez Hilton recorded a single-day high of 13.9 million page views on the day after the Oscars, web research firm Hitwise found that the celeb gossip site’s top traffic source is Facebook. That’s crazy — for nearly as long as web analytics have been widely available, the top referrer for just about anything has been Google."

"While details of this new online video world order are still being worked out among programmers and operators, this is surely going to wind up a mess. I don’t mind paying for content, but how much information will I need to provide in order to watch Rock of Love online? Will I need a PIN or a password? Or will it go even further and use facial recognition (don’t laugh, Comcast already had ideas about watching you in your living room)? And if history has shown us anything, it’s that inconvenient roadblocks thrown up before providing access to content will just drive people to piracy. That would be an unhappy ending for everyone."

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