ReadWriteWeb

What happens when the Recession Apocalypse has got you down? Get a couple of buddies together, call yourselves the Defenders of the Commonwealth and launch a $5 million Kickstarter campaign to promote the state of Kentucky in the first ever crowdfunded Super Bowl commercial.

The campaign, started by three advertising creatives, will recognize the state of Kentucky as the birthplace of the Happy Birthday song among other feel-good homages to the Bluegrass State.

The rationale behind Chiliphone's recent shopping spree became clear this morning with the change of the "About" navigation button from burnt sienna to seafoam green. In the last year, Chiliphone ("Where Wireless Technology and Good Chili Meet") has snapped up Flancastr, Drizzlr, Logbundler, Satanax, iFeebl and 4waybudEbooth.

The purchases initially baffled users and analysts both. Flancastr is a podcasting host devoted to food shows and Drizzlr is a glazing app, both of which made sense for the company. But Logbundler was a forestry database company; Satanax, a one-click website evilizer; iFeebl, a chat client for dimwits; and 4waybudeBooth, a social network for exhibitionists.

O'Reilly and TechWeb's Web 2.0 Summit, probably the biggest and most influential web technology event of the year from a business perspective, is about to start in San Francisco and for the first time - anyone can watch the speakers live on stage, for free.

See the live video player embedded below and watch this space for coverage of the first few speakers: Tim O'Reilly, John Battelle and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. With a line-up like that for the first hour, there's sure to be fireworks.

Hewlett-Packard is banking on alliances as the unified communications market hits its stride and Web 2.0 technologies become ingrained into voice services and other data networks within the enterprise.

Unified communications is the convergence of voice, data, instant messaging and presence technologies. It is one of the broadest terms that we come across but it is providing context as collaboration services and mobile technologies leverage the social Web.

Lazyfeed, the site we previously described as a "super-simple feed reader" is coming out with a whole new design today that not only makes everything even lazier, but changes the core purpose of the site itself.

Instead of just watching "live updates on every topic you care about, simultaneously," the site is now the "super-lazy way to blog about everything you love".

A lot get said about the economic value of API's but few have illustrated it as well as Sam Ramji did last week at Web 2.0 in San Francisco.

Ramji, vice president of strategy at Sonoa Systems, used his presentation at the Web 2.0 conference to compare Darwin's theories about finches to the 20th century economy and the rise of API's.

Our choices for the 10 best Twitter Videos focus on not just number of views, but on videos that help explain how Twitter has changed our culture. From the most popular video about why a group of teenage girls quit Twitter, to an instructional video about how to you use Twitter, to cartoons, to downright Twitterholics, the culture that is Twitter has been explained in many ways.

Another common theme in these videos is introducing non-Twitters users to the Twittosphere. David Lettermen makes great fun of the all too common question, "What is Twitter?" Twitter in HD, featuring Marina Orlova from HotForWords, covers the early days, as well as the creators of Twitter. If you'd like to know more about ReadWriteWeb follow us on Twitter @rww.

Facebook runs a website that gets a quarter of a trillion page views per month. The culture around Facebook has led to many popular videos. Some of the most viewed videos about Facebook are simply music videos and many of those didn't make our list.

While we did consider the number of views in our selection, we primarily focused on videos that illustrate all the ways Facebook has changed our lives. From Farmville, to warnings about losing privacy to what people don't like about Facebook, this list of videos shows society's reaction to Facebook's sudden rise in popularity. Also included are two 60 Minutes interviews with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. They're from 2008, back when Facebook only had 10% of the users they have today.

Our selection of the 10 most popular YouTube videos about the Web is of course based on page views. But we also filtered the results for videos that are most true to explaining the big-picture version of what the Web is. The selection includes some of the most creative ways the growth of the Web has ever been explained.

The fast paced growth of the Web too often keeps us focused on the latest and greatest, to the point were we lose perspective for how the Web has changed over time. So let's take a step back and get a more culturally-oriented overview of the Web. From a 1969 film about an internet that didn't have a name, to the most recent video on the Future of Publishing - as both nostalgia and analysis, we offer you these videos to help you reflect.

The Web 2.0 world may seem at times like a glamorous, hip place. Services get wild attention. The names are something out of the space age. The companies work out of coffee shops and lofts.

But the money has a way of running out before the entrepreneur can find a way to make a profit. No wonder the enterprise world can look so enticing to a Web 2.0 company.

So, we thought it might provide some perspective by looking at companies that are showing signs of reaching into the business market or have made the big switch.