First, some data points:

• Gawker Media’s Nick Denton reports a big traffic spike at his sites in January–298 million page views, a 30 percent year-over-year increase. That’s even though one of his biggest annual eyeball attractors–Steve Jobs at MacWorld–never materialized.
• Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack tells me that uploads to his Web video network have increased 50 percent so far this year.
• Now News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, citing comScore numbers, notes that its U.S. traffic shot up last month as well: Unique visitors were up 10 percent, which is worth noting for a (relatively) old social network, and those folks spent 30 percent more time on the site than they did a year ago. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)
• Obligatory Twitter traffic stat: 2.6 million uniques in January, up 1,362 percent over the last year.
• ComScore’s (SCOR) overall numbers for Web usage for the last month: Uniques up 4.1 percent, page views up 3.1 percent, time spent per visitor up 2.5 percent.

Is any of this meaningful? Hard to say: Any single site can argue that it has done something to generate more visits and engagement from its users: MySpace has its MySpace Music site, Twitter is the buzziest start-up of the last 12 months, etc.

And last month also happened to feature Barack Obama’s inauguration, which was a huge Web traffic driver.

Still… there aren’t that many more Americans who are getting online for the first time at this point. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that a wide variety of sites is posting big traffic gains because many of us are now unemployed or underemployed? And that we’ve got more a lot of downtime to surf and click?

Alas, all those eyeballs aren’t translating to dollars for many of these publishers: Just ask Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL, which saw page views increase 69 percent during the last three months of 2008, but saw ad revenue drop 18 percent.

But I digress. If for some reason you do find yourself with more time on your hands, might I suggest this trio of themed YouTube videos? Enjoy. And good luck.

[Image Credit: Daquella Manera]

Brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian, CEO and SVP-business development, are out, effective immediately. Jason Hirschhorn, who runs the company’s Sling Media Entertainment unit, plans on staying through the end of February; Ben White, chief creative officer at the entertainment group, will stay on through Feb. 1.

Some background from paidContent’s Staci Kramer, who had the story first:

Also leaving: Greg Wilkes, VP-sales. I’ve been told COO John Gilmore will take the reins for now but that may not be official. While no one is talking about any differences, there certainly is a big cultural gap between the tech-creative side and the traditional cable team at EchoStar.”

To tease that out: The Sling team can rightly point to a string of successes–the company racked up a number of awards at both the Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld last week–but if things were humming smoothly at Echostar, you’d think the company would find a way to make them stick around.

The Slingbox is a potentially disruptive technology, but it’s still nascent, and Sling.com just launched late last year and will need a motivated team to help it gain traction in a crowded field. All those involved say they’ll be taking time off; everyone who knows the team involved finds that hard to believe.