YouTube adds a new feature – Buffer anywhere

Now you can move the YouTube video playhead to any location in the timeline and the video will begin to stream from that position itself – you no longer have to wait for the entire video clip to load.

Thanks Google!

Alexa Rankings: YouTube is bigger than Google?

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch made an interesting discovery a while ago. According to the Alexa web ranking website, YouTube now has more pageviews than Google. Which of course is impossible…

If you had any doubts about Alexa’s reliability for traffic measurement, then you shouldn’t any longer. As Arrington says, and I support, the new Compete website provides a much more realistic figure.

Pownce invites for sale on EBay!

Yes, you read that right! Pownce invites are for sale on EBay. You can bid ‘em up, or Buy it Now for $9.95 (who pays $10 for a free service?)

Of course, you certainly don’t have to pay: just join this Pownce invites thread and an iHacking reader will get one sent to you ASAP.

Happy Powncing!

Wii outsells PS3 in Japan

Nintendo’s Wii console outsold Sony’s PlayStation 3 in Japan last month by six to one, says research. Nintendo sold 270,974 Wii consoles last month while Sony sold 41,628 PS3s, according to Enterbrain, a Japanese publisher that tracks console sales.

Nintendo has sold about 2.76m Wii consoles in Japan since the launch last December, while Sony has sold 970,270 PS3s since it debuted last November.

Globally, Sony has struggled so far to replicate the success it had with the first two PlayStation consoles.

Harry Potter Book 7 sets online pre-sale record

The seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has become online retailer Amazon’s most pre-ordered product, with almost 1.6 million copies bought globally ahead of the book’s release on July 21.

Amazon said on Monday that demand for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” passed the previous record of 1.5 million copies ordered online before the release of the previous book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”.

The retailer predicted that the number of orders for the seventh book would rise by “many more hundreds of thousands of copies.”

Harry Potter is published by Bloomsbury in Britain and distributed in the United States by Scholastic Corp.

Google makes Feedburner Pro free

It is little over a month after Google has acquired Feedburner that it has announced all its Pro features to be free for all users from now on. These mainly include Feedburner Stats PRO and MyBrand.

FeedBurner’s Stats PRO is just an enhancement to the regular stats that FeedBurner already provides. Most notably, it contains a stat called “reach” and also item views. As opposed to the number of subscribers that is displayed by FeedBurner, reach is a measure of how many people are “actively engaging with your content.” If you want to enable Stats PRO on your account, you have to go and turn it on in your feed’s control panel, though it is free for everyone.

MyBrand is a service that really appeals to larger sites that still want the benefits of using FeedBurner, such as stat tracking, but want everything to be hosted on their own domain. MyBrand lets you host your feed and access all of your stats from your domain to make the whole experience very transparent.

So just log in to your FeedBurner account and make the upgrade for free. Hopefully these are just the first of many improvements to come for FeedBurner now that it is backed by Google.