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Hillary Clinton launched a new ad to the Web that faded to black just like the final episode of the Sopranos.

The video drew more than a million viewers to the Clinton campaign Web site and to YouTube, which further illustrates the growing reliance by some of the more technologically savvy campaigns to connect with voters online.

In the new Clinton clip, Hillary Clinton, like Tony Soprano, spins through the musical selections in a diner in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., near her home in Chappaqua, as Bill asked her about the campaign and song winner.

The Soprano touches are subtle but perfectly obvious to any fan of the series. Nicely done.

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Last May, it was speculated that Google would buy China’s primary portal, Sina. However, many were unsure if it would be good idea for Google to own a news portal were all the content was “filtered” by the Chinese government.

Yesterday, Google announced a new partnership with Sina Corp as part of its continued efforts to provide value in China. Under a strategic partnership agreement, Google’s search service will be embedded in Sina’s search box, according to the Sina news release.

“This partnership leverages the strong offerings of two Internet powerhouses to provide Internet users in China [with] a better overall experience,” Sina’s chief executive officer Charles Chao said in a statement.

The deal will see Google users gain easier access to Sina’s news content as well as co-operation in advertising and search services.

Google partnerships in China include Soso.com and 163.com. With this deal, Google now has a close relationship with the 2nd, 5th and 6th most popular search and portal destinations in China, with Google.cn sitting down at 7th. Within the next 18 months, China will have a wider population of broadband users that the US and Google’s strategy of building relationships with the top 10 portals is a great way to increase awareness and much desired market share.

Technorati Tags: sinagoogle新浪china

Today at the Apple WWDC conference today in San Francisco, Apple announced that they have released a “Public Beta” version of their Safari browser for Windows. Steve Jobs said that Safari already has 5% of the market. You can now download Safari 3 as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Microsoft stopped developing the IE browser for the Mac platform about 4 years ago. So, Firefox and Safari have been the only choices for browsers on the Mac platform. Download the demo MOVIE

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Powerset is has been carefully flying under the radar screen on how their new (well-funded) “natural language” search engine works. After some initial media attention last fall, the company has been locked up and isn’t saying much.

On Saturday night, while I was watching the “Four Eyed Monsters” video, Powerset showed a screen shot (see below) of a sample search result on their blog. Many of us have been waiting to see how their product works and this sneak peek showed us that Google isn’t able to effectively match the natural language search on Powerset… even with the use of quotes.

The example they used in the sample was “politicians who died in office.” Clearly, doing the same search in Google does not produce results that are as useful as the same search done on Powerset. It will be interesting to see what happens when they launch and whether or not Google will find a way to improve their engine.

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I checked the status of the Four Eyed Monsters movie on Spout.com (where they earn $1 for every person who joins Spout.com) and they have almost doubled their money since my last post on Saturday Night.

BEST REVIEW:
“Everything that’s wrong with this movie is actually its strength. It lacks story because it is made from life. The acting that works the best is not acting at all. Whatever is self-consciously “movie-like” ends up feeling a bit superfluous to an otherwise fascinating process. This is a long movie for what it is…” ~Quint

Read more reviews at www.spout.com

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“Four Eyed Monsters”, is an hour-long (70 mins.) movie that was developed out of a video blog. Many are saying that it is the first full-length feature film to be available on YouTube… but it will only be available for one week.

The producers of the movie spent more than $100,000 on their credit cards to pay for the movie. Viewers have a chance to help Aaron and Susan earn back their costs by joining a site called, www.spout.com/foureyedmonsters. Spout has agreed to give Arin and Susan $1.00 for every person who joins the site! So far, they have earned $7,972!

I watched this movie with my wife tonight and it reminded us of the torment and happiness we experienced when we were a couple of starving artists in New York. We met and fell for each other in a play. She played the part of a cherry tree and I played an angel.

This movie took a long time to wrap up. I felt like I was watching a bunch of footage from someone’s school project, that later got spun into a story. I was bored sometimes but I laughed out loud a few times too. If you make me laugh, I become very forgiving of just about anything you might have screwed up.

My favorite part of the movie is when they showed the MySpace photos of each person’s profile and then the people started to talk. I thought that was very creative, but then they showed it again at the end. My second favorite part was the line drawing animation. I liked how Susan turned into a bird and then a plane.

I love that they put this up on YouTube and I’m glad I saw it. ENJOY!!

Technorati Tags:four eyed monstersyoutubesocial-media