South of the border, they get YouTube; up here in the great, white north, we get....blogTV.ca, a video sharing service from Alliance Atlantis that's just for us Canucks. Check out Mathew Ingram's take on YouTube North, which apparently claims it owns all content uploaded to the Web site. Hah! Here's a riddle: why is it that Canada ranks second behind South Korea when it comes to high-speed Internet penetration yet we lag when it comes to e-commerce, social networking, user-generated content, etc. Why?
For more thoughts, check out Global Nerdy, who believe blogTV is neither a blog or TV.

I thought it was just me receiving hundreds of e-mail messages over the past few weeks featuring the subject line "It's me, xxxx" that featured information about some yet-to-be-discovered stock but it turns out I'm just being caught up in the new spam onslaught hitting inboxes around the world. According to spam-filtering firm Ironport, the amount of spam has doubled over the past year, and it now accounts for more than 90% of e-mail messages.

Clearly, something needs to be done because all the efforts to filter out spam and shut down spammers isn't doing the job any more - if it was doing the job at all. So what needs to be done? Is there an effective way to pursue spammers other than convincing different governments around the world to make it illegal? One of the many challenges in shutting down spammers is the tools they're using to deliver their payloads, which include using other people's computers through downloaded viruses, malware or spyware.

If spam (including splogs and comment spam) continues to proliferate, it could choke the Internet and threaten innovation. After all, it's difficult to drive a Porsche down the super-highway if most of the lanes are bogged down by slow-moving jalopies, right?

In a press release ("Yahoo! Re-Aligns Organization to More Effectively Focus on Key Customer Segments and Capture Future Growth Opportunities") that could become a classic case study for public relations students, Yahoo has cleared the decks for Susan Decker to become its new COO by firing Dan Rosensweig. You figure a media company such as Yahoo would figure out a more elegant way than issuing a 1,500+ word press release. Of course, Decker's ascension to COO has been the word's worst kept secret so you figure Rosenweig isn't too broken up about getting canned less than three weeks before Christmas. Tom Foremski raises a good point the speculation Rosenveig was the one who leaked the "Peanut Butter Manifesto" a couple weeks ago, while Paul Kedrosky wonders why co-founder David Filo's name is missing from the press release. Yahoo's biggest challenge right now appears to be figuring out what it wants to be. Does it want to be an Internet services companies or a media company? And how long does CEO Terry Semel stick around?