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Numbers released from comScore today show that U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos online in the month of May, up from just over 30 billion in April. Hulu served up nearly 1.2 billion videos last month, nearly 3.5% of the overall market, while Google remained supreme, accounting for 43% of the market - a whopping 14.6 billion videos - with its powerhouse property, YouTube. Still, Hulu, a place where many watch full episodes of network television, is slowly inching from the pack, and Fox Interactive Media, sitting near the bottom of comScore's rankings, wants a piece of the action. They're target? Mobile.

May 2010 was a great month for YouTube. Not only did users of Google's online video service stream more videos per month in the U.S. than ever before (14.6 billion), but according to online analytics firm comScore, every single YouTube user now watches more than 100 videos per month. In total, Google's video properties now command slightly more than 43% of the online video market. No other online video service currently owns more than 3.5% of the streaming video market. In total, about 183 million Internet users in the U.S. watched online video last month.

The joy over wide-spectrum sharing has grown more muted even as it has become easier. The brouhaha over privacy issues, ranging from Facebook to Google to the U.S. Congress, has put the frighteners on some users.

For those who wish to share videos, but not with the whole of mankind, VidMe hopes with today's launch to offer an alternative to YouTube both online and with its iPhone app.

Google just announced that a U.S. district court has granted the company's motion for summary judgment in Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. The court argued that YouTube is protected by the so-called "safe harbor" provision. Viacom first sued Google in 2007 and the court case continued to simmer ever since. Viacom accused YouTube of deliberately withholding filtering technologies and knowingly infringing on the company's copyright.

The Guggenheim Museum is teaming up with YouTube in partnership with HP to discover the art of YouTube videos. Tasked with uncovering the "most creative video in the world," the companies have launched an international search by way of YouTube Play, a specially branded YouTube channel that will feature the entries in this new competition.

A new mashup lets you track the BP oil spill news using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more, all from one interface. Called "Oilaholic," the site serves as a one-stop shop for everything oil spill-related, including the latest tweets, the live video cam feed from uStream, the latest Facebook news and Flickr photos, the hottest headlines from Google News and elsewhere on the Web, a real-time "leak meter" feed (which is incredibly disturbing), and a live chatroom for venting your frustrations after you look at the leak meter, plus links to useful resources including government agencies, volunteer efforts, phone numbers to call and more.

Google announced this morning that it is enabling real-time discussions on YouTube channels by adding support for Google Moderator. Moderator allows sites to request questions or ideas from its audience that can then be voted up or down by the site's community of visitors. The service had previously only made appearances on YouTube for exclusive interviews with President Obama and the Prime Minister of Canada, but as of today every channel has the ability to add this feature.

Pakistan has now partially lifted its ban on YouTube, according to Naguibullah Malik, secretary of information technology and telecom. The site was one of many - including Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia - that were banned last week in response to the "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" movement, an event that was meant to celebrate free speech on the Internet by encouraging people to draw depictions of Muhammad, something considered sacrilegious to many of those in the Islamic faith.

In response, the Pakistani court ordered the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority to shutdown Facebook; YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia later followed.

Africa doesn't get enough attention. That's one reason to celebrate the launch of YouTube's first country channel in Africa. The company announced its new South African channel in a blog post minutes ago, bringing the total number of country channels globally to 23.

"In practice, this means that South Africa-based channels like Freshlyground and Khayav should enjoy more profile locally, and at the same time should also find it easier to identify other local users," wrote Divon Lan, YouTube Product Manager for Africa. "From now on when users in South Africa visit the localized site they will see, for example, the Most Popular and Most Viewed videos in South Africa along with local content that closely matches their interests."

YouTube announced earlier today that, at just five-years-old (can you believe it?), the online video host now exceeds over two billion views a day. According to the Google-owned site, "that's nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined."

What it didn't announce, however, was the hashtag-like system it appears to have quietly released for its commenting system, which turns certain Internet acronyms into colorful, searchable boxes of their own.