It is important to note that Attributor's study focused mainly on file-sharing sites like RapidShare, Hotfile and Megaupload. The study did not look at bit torrent sites like PirateBay or Torrenz. Given the popularity of these sites, chances are that Attributor actually underestimates the scope of e-book piracy in the U.S. You can find a more detailed look at the study's methodology here.

No matter the details of Attributor's methodology, it is clear that e-book piracy is a growing concern for the publishing industry. Unlike the music industry, the leading publishing houses haven't resorted to suing e-book pirates yet, but while the publishing industry has been more open about allowing DRM-free content on the market, most of the e-book content that is for sale today is still crippled by DRM. Sharing books - just like sharing music - is deeply ingrained in our culture, so it doesn't come as a surprise that a lot of people would use these illegal conduits to access pirated content.

The remote offers a full keyboard, two directional pads, volume and channel buttons, all encased in a form factor so large, it requires two hands to hold.

"...all that's missing is the aerial sticking out of the top, and it really would look like a remote control. For a jumbo jet."

Yikes, just yikes.

So far, we've been bullish on Google TV's potential, noting, for example, comments made by Google TV partner Blip.tv's CEO Mike Hudack, which talked of the product's game changing capabilities:

And the gushing continued.

Hudack has a point: putting the Google name brand and engineering know-how behind a product as big as this does hold promise for a more democratic future for TV.

However, there has been, until now, more focus on the big ideas surrounding the Google TV platform - like how it's positioned as an Apple TV competitor, what this means for Android developers, etc., etc. - and not a lot about the technical details of how one will interact with Web content via the TV set.

And apparently, unless this is some cruel prank, Sony's vision for Google TV is Web TV, take 2.

Now don't get us wrong - when Web TV first made the rounds the Web wasn't anywhere near as interesting as it is today (I remember - I had one!). There wasn't Facebook or Twitter or any Lady Gaga videos back then. I think its best feature was the way the LED would light up when you had new email. Yes, that was amazing, let me tell you.

But Web TV failed to captivate a large audience, because - guess what? - TV viewing is generally a passive, "lean-back" activity. Not one requiring a keyboard. Or any effort, really.

Are We Ready for Google TV?

Granted, with today's Web, there's a lot more to do. Google says we will be able to watch the Web on TV, Twitter is building a Google TV app and Android developers will have a whole new platform to target.

So maybe the living room is ready for Web TV again. Maybe...

Or maybe people will continue to surf their iPads and Android phones instead while the TV blares in the background, the comforting white noise it's always been. What do you think?

Google has begun testing yet another new feature for its flagship search product, offering entire website previews when you mouseover search results. Before you know it, the enter key and the mouse button will go completely extinct and you'll simply have to visualize the information your in search of and Google will make it appear on your screen.

SEO Consultant Patrick Altoft first noticed the feature, saying that they appear to be full-page previews with some interesting highlighting by Google.

One of the fascinating things about this is that they are highlighting certain sections of the page in orange and expanding the text to provide a snippet of information. This shows that they have the technology to know exactly where a piece of text is on every single web page. The snippets highlighted are not always the same as the snippet in the search results.

While it certainly seems like a great feature for users, we have to wonder what the effect on advertising and pageviews will be. Another big question is, just how real-time are these preview results? If we're seeing a search result for a dynamic page, are we getting a real-time preview or a look at a cached version from minutes, hours or even days ago?

This, in conjunction with a number of other factors, was enough for Metcalfe to state that the ".ly domain space should be considered unsafe" and that other sites, like bit.ly and ow.ly, should be forewarned.

Metcalfe outlines in the conclusion of his post what he's learned over the past two weeks since his domain was taken down:

• .ly domains deemed to be in violation of NIC.ly regulation are being deregistered and removed without warning - causing significant inconvenience and damage.
• .ly domains are being deregistered and removed due to reasons that do not correspond to the regulations defined in the official NIC.ly Regulations.
• NIC.ly seems to want to extend their reach beyond the domain itself and regulate the content of websites that use a .ly domain. The concept amounts to censorship and makes .ly domains untenable to be used for user-generated content or url shorteners.
• Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law is being used to consider the validity of domains, which is unclear and obscure in terms of being able to know what is allowed and what isn't.
• NIC.ly have suddenly decided that <4 letter .ly domains should only be available to local Libyans and this appears to create motivation to recover what premium domains they can to go back into this new local-only pot of domains

"Anyone running a business relying on a website with a one, two or three letter .ly domain should be incredibly cautious," warns Metcalfe.

The primary argument here, though, is that if vb.ly can be taken down simply because it links to content that violates Libyan Islamic/Sharia law, then other URL shortnening services should certainly be wary. Maybe it's time for Bit.ly to go back and reconsider j.mp?

Update: Violet Blue has written about the takedown of vb.ly, including a letter from a representative from Libya Telecom and Technology. In the letter, the official writes that "had your domain merely been a URL shortener for general uses similar to bit.ly (as you claim) there would have been no problem with it."

Public Buzz Messages Only

To filter out noise, the company has decided to only index public messages that users post directly to Buzz. Radian6 won't index re-posted items for Twitter or blogs, which makes sense, given that the company is already monitoring these items on Twitter and through RSS anyway. Interestingly, the company has decided to classify Buzz updates as blog posts. According to Radian6's founder and CTO Chris Newton, Buzz updates closely resemble blog posts, as they support " long-form commentary and threaded comments."

Buzz doesn't restrict users to Twitter's 140-character limit, so this looks like a sensible solution, though it seems rather early to assume that Buzz's users will want to use the service to post long-form content.

More Companies Integrate Buzz: Viralheat and Sendible - Sysomos Coming Soon

Earlier today, social media metrics platform Viralheat also announced support for Google Buzz. Just like Radian6, Viralheat will monitor conversations on Buzz. Social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos also just told us that it is working on integrating Buzz as well.

Another company that just announced support for Buzz is Sendible, which allows companies to run social media, SMS and email campaigns and track the online response to these updates.

Today, KnowEm announced the launch of a number of premium services aimed at small businesses and enterprises. For a one-time fee, KnowEm will create profiles for a brand or individual on over 150 social media sites. For a slightly higher fee, the company will also populate these profiles with your information.

Is Your Name Available?

The basic free version of KnowEm makes it easy to find out if your favorite username is still available on the 350 social media services. Just type in your favorite username and KnowEm will check if your name is still available on these sites. Given how closely our online identities are often tied to one single username, it only makes sense to claim the same username on every site and to ensure that somebody else isn't impersonating you. Other services that offer similar free features include Namechk (148 sites) and Usernamecheck.com (68 sites).

Premium Services

The new premium services extend KnowEm's portfolio by giving businesses additional services for claiming and monitoring their brands. For users of the Corporate Edition ($349), KnowEm will create profiles on 150 social media sites and populate them with photos, bios and descriptions. A cheaper version of this services ($99) only includes the signup process, and users will have to populate their profiles by hand. For an additional $49 per month, KnowEm will also register your name or brand on new social media services as they launch.

In addition to its free service, Pingdom also offers a basic account for $9.95 per month, which allows users to monitor up to 5 sites. The company also offers a business account for $39.95 per month, which can check up to 30 sites. The basic account also comes with 20 free SMS alerts, while business account users can receive up to 200 alerts by text message.

The web moves fast enough that we may as well start looking at what comes next. Easy to use and affordable tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs that track blog and twitter mentions are a given - but what kinds of crazy innovations can we hope for in the future?

Here's what we're thinking that might look like. We base these predictions in part on a conversation with Chris Golda of social media discussion search engine Backtype. Backtype is used under the hood at Radian6 and the company just announced a new partnership with Filterbox today. For an in-depth look at some of these kinds of services, see Social Media Monitoring Grudge Match: Radian6 vs. Scout Labs by Jason Falls. In house we use FriendFeed search a lot.

None of our predictions for the future are terribly shocking; to some degree they are just further developments of the same core value propositions these services already focus on. Hopefully this discussion will help spur some original thinking on your part, readers, and you can throw some suggestions for the future of the industry out in comments.

More Sources, Especially Facebook

The most obvious place for social media monitoring tools to go next is into Facebook. Twitter is the primary target for analysis right now because it's wide open and programmatically accessible. It's also 10% the size of Facebook. We're not sure whether Facebook is going to open up further or if monitoring tools are going to find a way to get around the fundamentally closed nature of the site to at least sample the conversations going on there. Can you imagine a monitoring company paying a wildly popular Facebook user to open up access to their newsfeed to monitoring? We can; it's a surprise that it's not already happening.

There's also a lot of multimedia to monitor, including television and radio content that is increasingly easy to find online. We expect that speech-to-text search services like Everyzing will find a place in the social media monitoring technology toolkit in the near future.

Source Analysis

Backtype's Chris Golda says that his company is working on more sophisticated analysis of participants in discovered conversations. If Robert Scoble says something bad about your company in comments, that's probably going to go further than if someone with a relatively small circle of connections does.

This is something that all the monitoring companies do now but it's relatively crude. We can imagine a much more sophisticated analysis. For every person online - primary circles of friends, semantic analysis of areas of interest and personal background information are all readily available in tools like Mailana, Twazzup, Calais (disclosure: RWW sponsor) and Headup. Imagine that information served up in an interface like Apture, but for every person and conversation on the web.

This is the kind of thing that data portability makes easier - when people travel around the web with their profiles and data with them, they are easier to get to know in a hurry. That's true for both the technologies that would serve up personalized content and the companies that would monitor what we do.

Conversation Discovery

If it's all about "joining the conversation," one of the biggest challenges for organizations jumping into social media is finding and prioritizing all the conversations available. Golda says that Backtype is working on becoming "like Compete for communities." Postrank is doing something like this already; it's discovering the most "engaging" blogs on a wide variety of topics. It's still ridiculously difficult to identify the most important sites of conversation on a given topic though. That's a problem ripe for solving.

We'd also like to see some real-time threshold monitoring. Let me know the moment that conversation about me or a given topic hits a certain level of intensity.

Those are some of the things we expect to see come to the world of social media monitoring in the near future. What else do you expect - or what would you really like to see?