The staid New York Times carried an embedded YouTube Video in a story about the way corporate announcements are made. The main motivation was probably to allow readers to see for themselves the self-congratulatory way founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announced to their audience that they had sold out to Google.

Jeff Jarvis quotes the New York Post speculation that in the wake of the YouTube deal Gawker Media is worth $400 million, CraigsList $250 million, and Digg.com $200 million. He dismisses the valuation of Gawker as over-optimistic compared to the others. And he takes a poke at the NYPost; he was going to link to the original page but the Flash made his browser crash. I had a go at finding the piece, but gave up in the wake of so much tabloid online…

MSN has launched a beta video sharing site called Soapbox on MSN.  It is only available to invited beta participants, but you can request an invitation…

One YouTube-ers’ view of the future under Google…

Wired’s Monkey Bites blog notes that Microsoft is expected to release the final version of Internet Explorer 7 later today, but right now you can grab the final build from Yahoo. Yahoo has packaged a version of IE 7 that’s been optimized to run with the latest version of Yahoo Mail, it says.

Google takes another poke at Microsoft with the announcement of Goolge Docs (renamed Writely) and Spreadsheets, simple online wordprocessing and spreadsheet creators with built in collaboration.

Microsoft’s Live team has produced and updated version of the Live Search Macros which allow for custom searchboxes to be created which search sub-sets of web content.

I just downloaded the Google Maps mobile version to my Samsung D600 mobile phone. The site recognises your phone and allows you to download a specific Java app for your phone. The quality of the interface is really impressive…

eWeek points out that Nicholas Negropote’s plan to deploy 100 million laptops will create the “largest computing monoculture” in the world, and hence the world’s biggest security headache.

How to make a newspaper talk: “At Online News, Chet Rhodes of WashingtonPost.com gives an inspirational talk about how he is turning the paper into video, training print reporters to take video (it takes 55 minutes, he says) and how it is working. Why do this? he asks. Because you have to. When we looked at video from a number of news sites in my CUNY class, the students liked WashingtonPost.com’s video best because it was still somewhat raw, not overproduced. And that makes it easier for print people to learn how to shoot good video, I say, as the definition of good shifts away from the priests of the tools. ” Jeff Jarvis.