First it was the newspapers to bring a case against Craigslist because of their declining advertising market, and now it's the state of South Carolina. Craigslist has been in the news quite often lately as a result of "suspected Craigslist killer" Philip Markoff and the dispute over its sex advertising model.

Most recently, South Carolina's attorney general Henry McMaster, threatened to bring criminal charges against Craigslist over the site's sex-related ads. Craigslist responded by suing McMaster and asking for an apology. The issue behind the dispute concerns the "erotic services" ads section on Craigslist. McMaster says the section corresponds to prostitution.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

One week from today, May 18th, Wolfram Alpha will officially launch. Stephen Wolfram is the scientist behind this search tool. He wrote the book, A New Kind of Science, and is responsible for the Mathematica computational software.

So, is it a Google-killer? Danny Sullivan says, "Nope!" He goes on to say, "it should become an essential in anyone's search tool kit," but coins the service a "fact search engine." When you ask the service a question, it returns a tremendous amount of statistical information in the form of charts, graphs, etc.

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Popularity: 14% [?]

Disney is buying a 30 percent stake in Hulu.com meaning Disney movies and ABC TV shows will be available on Hulu. In the deal that was announced this week, Disney will be bringing older movies and ABC shows to the site in hopes of gaining new viewers and ultimately generating new revenue from the video sharing site.

Hulu has experienced unprecedented growth since its launch in 2007. Recent reports from comScore show that 380 million videos were viewed on the site last month, which is up 14.3 percent from its February statistics. Although still falling behind YouYube, Hulu is among the top three online video sites in the U.S.

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Popularity: 12% [?]