Back in April, the service became one of the top three Internet video providers, alongside Google - which includes YouTube and Google Video - and Fox, according to comScore. Kilar includes a number of statistics in his note to show that the site has continued its climb in popularity during the rest of 2009.

Monthly streams, as measured by comScore, grew to 924 million, a 307 percent increase from this time last year.

Hulu's content library doubled over the past year. We now offer over 14,000 hours of premium content, up from 5,600 hours at this time last year."

The addition of Disney as a content partner last April surely provided a traffic boost, as the ABC owner brought television sensations like "Lost", "Grey's Anatomy" and other prime-time hits to the site.

A live video of Obama's inauguration topped the list of embedded videos for 2009, while "Saturday Night Live", "Family Guy", "The Office", "The Simpsons" and "Naruto Shippuden" were the most popular shows of the year.

But what was the overall winner for 2009 on Hulu, you might be wondering? A decidedly NSFW SNL short called "Motherlover".

For those of you who still haven't made the digital television switch but still want to watch, Hulu will be streaming the ball drop in Times Square tonight starting at 10 pm EST.

Upon first seeing the resignation coverage, even I wondered why Tina Fey was continuing to beleaguer Palin with her spot-on impersonation. After a few minutes I realized only Andy Samberg would have the gall to produce a Saturday Night Live skit of this length and settled in to watch Palin defer her duties to Republican Lieut. Governor Shawn Parnell.

In 2008, Palin Halloween costume posts were extremely popular, a NYC bar saw record customers for their widely promoted Palin drag show and BoingBoing even featured a Hustler film touting a Palin lookalike.

While last year's election would not have been dull, it appears that Sarah Palin and her many iterations were the internet's comic relief in an environment that might have otherwise been staunch. In fact, Palin took the brunt of ridicule on the Republican side while John McCain only came under scrutiny for his advanced age.

So the question remains, did Americans turn out to polls in record numbers because of their wholehearted belief in Barack Obama, or was a portion of that due to a mainstream distaste for Sarah Palin?

Said Palin in her resignation speech, "You are naive right now if you don't see a full court press from the national level picking away right now - a good point guard. Here's what she does, she drives through a full court press, protecting the ball... she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win. And that's exactly what I'm doing..."

Michael Jordan was a great point guard and he didn't quit the first time to help the Chicago Bulls, he quit to pursue a Minor League baseball career. When Palin says she's going to "make a positive difference from outside the Governor's office," do you think she's going to launch a presidential campaign, land a talk show deal or do something else?

Eurekster provides a service called a Swicki, a search function that lets site owners identify what other sites in their community they would like to have included in their Swicki search results. We've used Swicki here at ReadWriteWeb for some time, as have many other blogs and online communities. The company offered revenue sharing from search ads. Eurekster says that more than 100,000 sites have created Swickis and traffic to Eurekster used to be strong.

Both Eurekster and Swicki.com are down and users report to us that's been the case for the past two days. Traffic to the site has plummeted since the start of the year and key executives have departed. According to their LinkedIn profiles, VP of Engineering Blair Cassidy and VP of Product Development Tac Leung left the company in March and April respectively - but both are still listed on the company's management page. As we publish this, neither emails nor phone messages have been returned by the company. Channel Marketing Manager at Eurekster Alex Holmes sent out one Twitter message two days ago reading "temporary service outage on http://www.eurekster.com . Swickis will be back shortly."

Eurekster was founded in October of 2003 and raised more than $6 million in venture capital, most recently a $5.5 million round in March of 2007.

What Might Have Happened?

It's always interesting to ask why a startup may not have succeeded, though to be fair Eurekster could come back at a moment's notice. The company's method of determining relevance in search was always a little unclear. Google Site Search is easy to install and its results are fairly predictable. Many users wanted search results in chronological order, but that's not the first place Swicki searches took you. Finally, the Swicki usually lived in a blog sidebar. That's a hard place to build a business.

Those are our theories about why Swicki has struggled. What are yours? We hope to hear from the company soon, it's never a pretty sight to see a startup sputter out.