Here’s a strangely addictive animated music video that is making the rounds on the interwebs this morning. It’s a little story about love in the early 2000s, when the landscape was dominated by AOL and IRC. Enjoy trying to get this little jingle out of your head for the rest of the day! <3

Last week Apple posted an interesting interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson: the minds behind 37 Signals. This is one of the companies that’s leading the charge towards distributed online applications, so it’s nice to get a feel for their philosophy and ethics.

Granted you’ll have to get through quite a bit of heavy handed Apple propaganda, but there are some good quotes in there, like “it’s not the low end of the market, it’s the smart end of the market“. Along with Google, 37 Signals is showing the world that the best solution for productivity isn’t necessarily the next iteration of Microsoft office: it’s often a lightweight webapp that fills one roll, and fills it well.

While logging into the iTunes store today I was greeted with a great surprise! One of my favorite NPR radio shows, This American Life has finally added their program to iTunes’ lineup of podcasts! Formerly, the only way to listen to TAL episodes was by streaming them from the website or purchasing them from the archives at $0.95/pop. I always hoped to eventually see the show migrate to a podcast format but didn’t see it happening if they were using episode sales as a revenue stream. The way they are making it work is each show will be available as a free podcast for one week after the original airs. After that it moves into the archives where you can either stream it for free or purchase it for the same price as before. Fans of TAL rejoice! And when you are finished rejoicing, go subscribe today so you can take advantage of this free service!

Looks like Google has pulled the trigger on their YouTube bid: 1.65 Billion in stock has bought Google the company that proved social video could work on the web. YouTube’s purchase and subsequent transformation from past status as venture capital dependent startup to its future as a legitimate Google subsidiary will likely go down as a major event in the web history.

There are a plethora of question left over from YouTube’s days as a swinging single: how will copyrighted materials be treated? What about their $1 million per month bandwidth bills? What are they going to call this adopted child? If there’s thing we’ve learned from the tech sector’s mega-players it’s that you can solve almost any problem with money.

Gobs and gobs of money.