ReadWriteWeb

"The hologram of a DNA spiral that I'm holding in my hand," your professor might say, "can be turned, twisted or expanded at-will and everyone on this video call will be able to see me do it." Is that the distant future of education, sales and casual communication online? Not if Augmented Reality company Zugara has its way.

The company announced today that it is working on fast and easy shared webcam Augmented Reality and its first prototype is already available.

Last week, YouTube announced they will begin supporting the upcoming web standard HTML5 which allows videos to be viewed without an Adobe Flash plugin. Those who wanted to play around with the new HTML5-enabled website were directed to a separate experimental site called TestTube. However, noted the YouTube blog post, only Chrome, Safari, and IE users could give the new site a try. Firefox was notably absent from the list.

YouTube just launched a streamlined video player and redesigned video pages. The new video pages give YouTube a more minimalist and streamlined look, with a stronger focus on the video. For now, these new features are opt-in only. It is not clear when Google plans to make this new design the default theme for YouTube.

The good folks at UK open government consultancy Delib have just released a short documentary about the United States' first year since President Obama's Open Government memorandum.

The documentary was shot by Delib founder Chris Quigley over two months last year, both on location in Washington DC and via Skype.

You've probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson. The duo's filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow's New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one - to make video interesting.

A group of podcasters in Portland, Oregon have teamed up with internet friends around the world to create a new type of charity fundraiser, a live streaming telethon. Called 30 Hour Day, the event begins this evening. It will use streaming media services to deliver the content, the Causes Facebook application to collect donations, and Twitter to spread the word.

30 consecutive hours of music, variety acts, podcasts and other entertainment will raise money for local charity organizations. Will it work? Portland has a deep community of geeks and connections all around the web, so perhaps this group will be able to keep people entertained around the clock.

Being one of the first social networking sites in existence certainly doesn't establish you as the best or most popular. For this reason, Friendster leaked a video outlining its look and product features. According to TechCrunch, the company is set to release the new product features tomorrow morning. If the below video was meant to get prospective users excited for a revitalized service, they could have approached it from a different angle. Below are the top four reasons Friendster's new messaging needs to change.

MOG's $5 all-you-can-eat streaming music subscription service has finally launched. Although we interviewed CEO David Hyman in mid October, the music industry has changed considerably in the last two months. Imeem sold to MySpace for a song, and competitor Spotify is rumored to be delaying a United States launch as it refuses to enter North America with a paid-only version. We spoke to MOG CEO David Hyman to find out his thoughts on the industry and why his service is different from his competitors.

We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone application which allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too.

When it comes to video discovery, the thrill of the hunt is only really fun when you're viewing more good than bad. You could scour your feeds for entertainment, but the fodder you'll file through is enough to feel like work. Tomorrow is a Friday, and we all know that you're going to mentally check out from your desk at about 1pm. With ReadWriteWeb's list of easy video aggregation services you can spend the afternoon curating your corporate videos, scouring for media clips or sharing amusing videos with friends: