Mark Hendrickson / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn Closes Its Round; Got That Billion Dollar Valuation  —  LinkedIn has raised $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures.  The investment values the business social network at just over $1 billion.

Brad Stone / Bits:
A Redesign at Skype  —  Skype, eBay’s Internet phone division, has always been something of a problem child for the e-commerce giant.  —  The service is growing like a weed, with 309 million registered users.  It earned $126 million in the first quarter of the year, exceeding what eBay and PayPal […]

Dan Farber / Outside the Lines:
Facebook and Google still not ready to connect friends  —  The meaning of openness in the realm of social networks continues to be difficult to pin down.  At a panel discussion Tuesday at Supernova 2008 in San Francisco, representatives from Facebook, Google, and Plaxo discussed …

Fred / A VC:
Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We’re Doing  —  I am speaking at WidgetWeb today.  They asked me to talk about widgets as startups, but I am not going to talk about that.  I am going to talk about the end of widgets as we know them, starting with […]

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Flickr Co-founders Join Mass Exodus From Yahoo  —  Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward.  They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the […]

Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:
Google App Engine Goes Down and Stays Down  —  Google App Engine, which launched in April to compete with Amazon’s web services unit, has been having major problems over the last day.  Currently, the application directory and, more importantly, all third party applications (here’s our test application), are offline.

comScore:
More than 4 Billion Videos Viewed at Google Sites  —  In April, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with more than 4.1 billion videos viewed (38 percent share of all videos), as YouTube.com accounted for 98 percent of all videos viewed at the property.

Mshapiro / The Mozilla Blog:
Firefox 3 coming soon!  —  The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!).  Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly.  Download day will officially commence once the site goes live.  The 24 hours period will be clocked from […]

Mark Cuban / Blog Maverick:
Hulu is kicking Youtube’s Ass  —  It is coming up on 2 years post my declaration that only a moron would buy Youtube and that Google was crazy for actually going through with it.  —  In that period of time, while Youtube traffic has skyrocketed, they have been steadfast in […]

Michael Learmonth / Silicon Alley Insider:
Joost CEO: We’ve Figured It Out This Time  —  Two years ago, in the wake of Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, Joost was suposed to solve a very 2006 dilemma: Fearful media companies wanted to distribute their video over the Internet, but didn’t know how they’d do it.  […]