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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Twitter’s status site said this yesterday: “We’re currently diagnosing the causes of an unplanned site outage that happened a few minutes ago. We are recovering from this issue now and apologize for the interruption in service.”

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Barry Diller has tried just about every gambit possible to boost his Ask.com search engine, but he keeps coming up with more. The latest: Coupons.

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The Financial Times’s pay wall for its FT.com site has been a success. So what’s with the note warning wayward emailers?

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In order to move from money pit to profit center, YouTube has to spend less, which is hard for the site to talk about. And it needs to sell more ads on more videos–which YouTube is happy to talk about. Hence, yesterday’s news that YouTube would start selling against “viral videos.”

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Google says its oft-maligned video site is going to start making lots of money soon. But it still has some work ahead of it. Right now, for instance, just four in 10 of YouTube’s most popular clips carry advertising.

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Take that, Microsoft! Meet “Caffeine,” Google’s new search engine…which looks just like the old search engine. Confused? Don’t worry–the world’s search pros are trying to figure out the difference between plain-vanilla Google and the new version, which Google is previewing via a blog post.

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Give this to Steve Ballmer: After getting roundly hammered in the past few years for either missing out on deals (see: AOL/Google) or paying too much for the ones he did land (see: Facebook at $15 billion), he seems to be on a roll.

Last week, Microsoft was roundly praised for the way it structured its Yahoo deal. And today, the company seems to have struck a smart pact with Publicis, which will pay $530 million for Redmond’s Razorfish digital ad agency, which Ballmer never wanted anyway. Just as important: The French ad giant will agree to buy a certain amount of search and display inventory from Microsoft over the next five years.

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A federal judge has dismissed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider-trading case against Mark Cuban, the AP reports. Astonishingly, Cuban has yet to say anything about this on his blog or his Twitter account. But I assume that will be rectified shortly.

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Is the ad market really starting to rebound? Or is the (muted, cautious) happy talk we we’re hearing this spring just happy talk? Time to take a peek at Google’s quarterly earnings this afternoon, which might give us some insight.

As per Google’s last report card, Wall Street is expecting the company’s revenue to decline from the previous quarter–unthinkable for Google in prior years, but now no longer a shock. But Wall Street will be looking for both numerical and qualitative hints that things are getting better, or at least have bottomed out.

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JP Morgan has good news for Microsoft: Its massive ad campaign for Bing is working just fine. The bad news for Microsoft: For most people, Google is already working just fine.

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An endless ad barrage may be enough to get you to sample Bing. But it can’t ensure you’ll like the results once you try it.

That’s the conclusion Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney reached after taking Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin and comparing it to Google’s and Yahoo’s. The result: Google still delivers better results most of the time. In 71 percent of searches, Google either supplied the most relevant answer or tied with other engines. Bing did that 46 percent of the time.

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Another vote for the “we’ve seen the worst of the recession” camp: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, talking to reporters at the big advertising festival in Cannes, says the economy should start picking up in a few months.

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When a big music label sues a scrappy Web music start-up, most people tend to sympathize reflexively with the little guy. But not everyone. Here’s the case against Grooveshark–not from EMI, which has hauled them into court, but from an indie that by all rights ought to be working with Grooveshark: “The service is just ripping off the band.”

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I’m pecking this out from the bowels of the New World Stage, where Day Two of the Twitter-centric 140 Character Conference is meandering along. But the most interesting Twitter-related news is coming from outside the conference: Data from comScore showing that Twitter-related search has become both measurable and meaningful.

Well, measurable, at least.

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