It's time for another look at the little stories that caught our eye on the good ship internet this fine Monday.
Today we journey from The White House and its Google+ hangout to RIM's new CEO's favourite pastimes. Enjoy.
Obama Plus - President Obama has joined the hoards of people standing around not really knowing what to do with themselves on Google+, although he has a Hangout planned which is more than most of us can say. Want to ask him something? Upload a video of your question to the White House YouTube page by 28 January to be in with a chance. [Time]
Search wars - Speaking of Google+, a group of Facebook devs weren't all too pleased about Google Search Plus Your World only offering private '+' results and not data from Facebook, Twitter or any other social network. So they just went right ahead and built a browser bookmarklet that does – and what have they called it? "Don't be evil". Zing! Twitter, meanwhile, is too busy growing to worry about Google+. Except when it's criticising Google+, obviously. [All Things D] [Guardian]
YouTube's quite big - On to Google's other little site, you know, the one that shows videos? 4 billion of them are streamed every day on YouTube now, a massive 25% jump over the past eight months. About 60 hours of video is uploaded every minute – that's quite a lot of vaguely amusing feline activity. [Reuters]
Tumblr's big too - Time to stop making jokes about Tumblr being the hipster's blogging platform of choice – it now reaches 120 million people and racks up 15 billion page views each month. It's totally over. [Social Beat]
Digital recycling - Remember ReDigi? Vaguely? Yeah, us too – it's the site that wants to recycle your digital tracks by reselling them when you're finished; shockingly, record labels seem to have a bit of a problem with that but ReDigi insists that it's legal, claiming that any "copying" it does is covered by fair use principles. Good luck with that. [Ars Technica]
Piracy's okay – Maybe ReDigi needs to get Frederic Filloux on board after his interesting piece on how piracy is part of the digital ecosystem, citing how loads of us learned how to use Photoshop, Illustrator and the like on pirated copies before going on to invest in the expensive software once we knew what we were doing. Win win. [Guardian]
RIM's new CEO has a hog – Bless Thorsten Heins, who has revealed that the 'other interests' section of his CV includes road cycling, riding his BMW motorcycle and watching basketball. Will that help him save RIM? Nah. [Reuters]
Android apps amnesty – one of the crew behind CyanogenMod has created an alternative Android App Market where all the apps Google deems to have violated its approval guidelines will go to, you know, be available. [Gizmodo]
Apple's e-textbook win – Apple's textbook keynote last week might have been a bit of a yawn for most of us, but it's proven to have piqued the interest of the academic world, for now at least. The interactive iBooks textbooks saw 350,000 downloads in three days after the announcement. [GigaOm]
Thank you, Captain Obvious – A web safety watchdog has warned the nation's teachers to steer clear of Facebooking, tweeting, emailing and chatting with pupils online after 43 teachers accused of misconduct last year did so. If we were teachers, we'd want to avoid our pupils outside school at all costs – that's just one in a long list of reasons why we're not. [Guardian]
