Here’s a good way to get your hands on scarce venture capital money: Create a start-up geared around Twitter-like “real-time” sharing and conversations. The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet. But it has just raised around $1 million.

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Condé Nast is still in layoff mode, but that hasn’t stopped the publisher from putting together an app worth writing about. It’s part of a digital magazine strategy that actually makes some sense.

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Still have a job in media? Looking for a wee bit of inspiration in a gloomy week in a miserable year? Here’s a free pep talk.

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More love from Google for its oft-maligned YouTube unit: Last week, Google officials went out of their way to praise the video site’s progress and said it was well on its way from money pit to profit center. Today, the company gives YouTube a pat on the back via an atta-boy blog post. Not much new here, but the message is that the Google folks are feeling ever more confident about YouTube’s prospects. But not enough to actually talk about them in concrete terms.

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Waiting for the economy to come roaring back? So is Google. The search giant had a decent quarter, but not one that’s going to blow away Wall Street or convince anyone that the economy is roaring back. But it’s an okay performance for a media company in a recession.

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Figuring out Twitter’s business model may be complicated, but using the service isn’t: It’s fast, short and to the point. Unless you’re the world’s biggest retailer.

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Poor John Squires. The Time Inc. SVP seems like an affable fellow. So what has he done to deserve this impossible task–figuring out a digital strategy for Time Warner’s publishing unit? Or, to put it in Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore’s words, figuring out “how to put the genie back in the bottle”?

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Did you know that Internet publishing–Internet publishing supported by advertising, that is–creates millions of jobs in this country? It’s true, says a trade group, which is trying to convince Washington that all that is at risk if people start passing pesky laws.

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Nope, Twitter still hasn’t trotted out a business model yet, and that may or may not be a problem for potential acquirers like Google or Microsoft. But it’s a nonissue for a growing number of start-ups hoping to succeed simply by positioning themselves in Twitter’s general vicinity. Today’s example: StockTwits, a day-trader-meets-Twitter site that just raised $800,000 from venture capital firm True Ventures.

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YouTube generates billions of views but no profits. That’s because Google’s video site only sells advertising on a small portion of the clips it shows. That may be changing, argues Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay.

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Yes, you can still get someone to invest in a Web start-up with zero revenue. It helps if you can insert the word “Twitter” into your pitch, though. Meet TweetDeck, a one-man outfit that makes free software that organizes your Twitter stream.

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