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For an industry that is often criticized on its monopolistic practices and habits of relying on cripplingly intense DRM, the Hollywood studios sure got Hulu right.

I’ve never bought the idea that consumers are “entitled” to free content. That’s crap - creative content costs money and takes time to create, and video especially can be an expensive and risky product to make.

The problem has always been a question of lock-in and user experience. So long as the cost of buying video (or music) is greater than the inconvenience of getting it illegally, people won’t be buying video.

And since people are already paying for their internet connection, you can scratch off trying to get people to subscribe to an extra fee for TV online. So the studios figured correctly that if you made free video widely available in a really great player with limited commercial interruption, people would flock to it.

I logged in to Hulu today to watch Dr. Horrible’s sing-along blog, and I realized that Hulu has taken a swing at one of the bigger problems with embedding and sharing video: sometimes you only want to share a segment.

When you click to embed a Hulu video, they let you crop the embed video to whatever segment you want. Think that one-liner was the most hilarious thing ever? No problem - share just those 10 seconds.

Brilliant. I see a bright future for Hulu.

A recent Forrester report shows B2B blog adoption dropping off sharply from 2006 to 2007, and it predicts a continued drop in 2008.

Why? MediaPost shares:

“The gap between blog hype and reality widened in 2007,” said Laura Ramos, Forrester analyst and chief author of the report. “After counting 36 companies that started promoting corporate blogs on their Web sites in 2006, the number of B2B firms starting up blogs dropped sharply to 19 in 2007.”

One of the big problems with blogging is that it’s too easy. Twenty seconds on WordPress.com and you can start posting to the world at large without having to talk to a single person in the IT department.

But there’s a big difference between simply blogging and blogging well, and that’s why businesses aren’t necessarily seeing the kinds of results that blogging hype has promised them.

To be fair, hype is hype, and there was a lot of it in 2006 (although the trend still points upward). I can understand why some companies who haven’t seen ridiculous upswings could think they’ve been had.

There really is value to be gained form blogging, but it’s all about the kinds of conversations you start and the relationships you build, not it how well you can, in the approximate words of Eminem, “get up on the mic and spit it.”

It’s a really good idea for large companies to take advantage of social media technologies to remove some of the management overhead that just comes naturally with directing a large group the old fashioned way.

One of the most well known tools is a blog. Giving employees a blog they can use internally (or externally) is a good way to get your company out there.

But as we move forward, it’s more and more likely that you’re going to be hiring people who already have their own blog, either on their own hosting or with Wordpress.com or Typepad or one of a hundred other freely available services.

And you can’t make internal communities and blogging mandatory. Groudswell has a good explanation of why it’s a bad idea (with case studies to back it up!).

So the problem going forward is going to be: how do you integrate employees’ personal blogs into an internal network?

I think it would be interesting to see a plug-in for engines like WordPress that would let users specify, for example, a particular category of post to be fed only to a secure intranet area. This way an employee could keep their personal blog, but be able to participate in an internal blogging structure as well.

Blogging is just the tip of the social media iceberg, of course. Who wants to set up a brand new profile when they move to a new company?

I’m interested to see how businesses approach this problem.

I know I’ve said it before, but if you’re running your web site and you’re not paying attention to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, you’re ignoring a very good resource.

Just yesterday, Sven Naumann (who is on the search quality team) wrote a post dealing with concerns webmasters have about scraper sites that pull exact post content and republish it as their own.

So what does Google do? They use a couple of methods, which they don’t identify, to determine which bit of duplicate content is the original piece, and then point to those.

For people who see scraping sites placing higher in search results than their own, original content, they offer this advice:

Some webmasters have asked what could cause scraped content to rank higher than the original source. That should be a rare case, but if you do find yourself in this situation:

• Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
• You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
• Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines.

Largely, the answer seems to be “don’t worry, we’ve got a handle on it.” But if you want more details on how to minimize duplicate content within your own domain, you can go check out the post.

What I think Google really needs to solve though, is the arrival of “old” content for the first time online. How do you figure out who the real owner of that content is?

As always, Darren Rowse at ProBlogger has great advice for people who struggle with regularly finding interesting things to blog about.

All too often, a potential blogger will raise the very valid concern: “I’m worried that I’ll run out of things to blog about,” and some new media maven who has a literal hardline between their frontal lobe and the Comcast pipes running to their house will casually dismiss it: “There’s always something to write about. You’ll see.”

That’s not necessarily the case. It can be very helpful to schedule your editorial, and if you’re a blogger (or a potential blogger) who is worried about being regularly inspired, Darren’s post is well worth a read:

The first step in a journalistic system for blogging is having a plan for each month. Set up a spreadsheet, a table in a word processor, or a calendar on your desk - it doesn’t matter how you do this, but you need a monthly plan. On that plan you need to mark out the days you will definitely blog. This might be every day, just the weekdays, the weekends, every Wednesday - whatever works for you and your audience. Now you have a visual plan of what’s needed you can start filling in the blanks.

Essentially, he advocates mapping out, by month, the days you will blog and the topics that you will blog about.

If that sounds like too much work for you (it sounds like a lot of work to me, and as a blogger I am both inherently lazy and constantly wearing a bathrobe), you might try a more “intermediate” system like the one I like to use. It works especially well if you have a blog that covers a particular beat or topic:

1. Create a folder on your hard drive.
2. Whenever you run across a link that fits your topic, ask one question: do you need to blog about it immediately for it to be relevant?
3. If the answer is yes, blog about it.
4. If the answer is no, add it to the folder.
5. If you think of an idea not tied to a link, create a text file, put in the headline, and save it to the folder.
6. Whenever you do not know what to blog about, refer to your folder.

Seth Godin wrote a post the other day called Needle in a Haystack Marketing. It’s a good post: the idea is that if you solve specific problems for small groups of people, and you do it often enough, you’ll have a repository of really useful information.

I remember reading The Long Tail when it came out and trying, the entire time, to figure out how exactly blogging fit into the equation. I refused to think that there was no long tail here.

There is one. The long tail of blogging happens with your archives. If you answer one question thoroughly and well, it will turn up in Google when people search for it. You’re getting the ten or fifteen people per day who need the answer on your site. And that’s true for every post like this that you do.

You do it enough, and you’re going to get a steady stream of exposure from search. Forever. Pretty good return for a one-time investment.

Jason showed Disqus to me a few weeks back, and I seriously considered using it — until I figured out that you don’t own your comments anymore. One of the main points of cultivating comments is to have valuable content added to your site, and with Disqus, it’s added to their site.

Scoble has a demo of the system (and fawns a bit over it) at Scobelizer.

Here’s my question, where does Google see the comment appear first? If it’s on the Disqus site, that means your blog is now being populated with “duplicate” content (or no content at all.) Scary.

Jason just tested this, see the screen shot below. This is a search for a comment made on “his” blog. Google sure doesn’t see it as a being linked to his content. This makes Disqus a total non-starter IMHO.

I can understand why the Typepad crowd might like this, as they aren’t used to totally owning their content, and are generally feature-constrained. I’m surprised Fred Wilson doesn’t care about the platform and SEO ramifications though.