Remember Google Video? After the acquisition of YouTube, Mountain View eventually reengineered the site as a video search engine — though most of the results that come up are from YouTube. The Google Video player has now returned to Google Apps For Your Domain, the company's suite of business applications hosted online.Those boring meetings you've made it your life's goal to avoid attending? Now your boss can make you sit through them after the fact. Project engineer Daniel Steinberg introduces the new feature in a promotional video. On YouTube, natch. But I'll give Steinberg this much credit: The site makes it easy to "privately and securely" download embarrassing intra-office videos so that you can share them with us here at Valleywag.

Within a group of 63 online video destination sites tracked by HitWise, YouTube increased market share to 75 percent from 59 percent from May of 2007 to May of 2008. Visits among all the sites were down a scant over 1 percent, but time spent on the sites were up 9 percent. Why are views slightly down? One reason is because more visits are going to video destinations not in the top 63. Though 58 other sites not in the top five, taken together, lost share as well, from 12 percent to eight percent of totall visits.

Google Video, which became largely pointless a video search engine largely pointless after the acquisition of YouTube, has been redesigned. The world will continue to just use YouTube search — since most of the results returned by Google Video are from YouTube anyway. [Google Video Blog]

¬ Having blogged that Facebook should take the $750 mil and run, dot-com expert John Battelle backtracks when the Harvard Crimson calls. The key to looking prescient: always have two contradictory opinions to point back to. [Harvard Crimson]
¬ Marissa Mayer gets interviewed — in German (or translated, at least). Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped translates the highlights. Says Google's VP of search: "Nobody ever writes about how we constantly improve our ranking system!" Because it'd be such a riveting story! [Google Blogoscoped]
¬ Kansas City is the new Silicon Valley. [MSNBC]
¬ Wait, Bangalore is the new Silicon Valley. [DNA India]
¬ New York Times Valley correspondent John Markoff (pictured somewhere up there) reads Valleywag. I hope he's commenting as "openwag". [POP! PR Jots]
¬ Things MC Hammer says in his guest post the Google Video Blog: "He [his character in a music video] is willing to do 'all tricks' if she 'speaks it from her lips.' This willingness is possible only if he gets to know her. He seeks commitment, romance and sensitivity." Things Hammer says in the video: "Girl, I need to know your name." Now that is commitment. [Google Video Blog]

Since the Seth Godin video was so popular, Daniel H. Wilson's talk at Google HQ should be even more relevant and businesslike. In the following video, Daniel discusses his book, How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

Google's new infrastructure, now rolling out, is named Bigdaddy. No comment needed. [Matt Cutts]
Bubble's back, babe. [Techdirt]
CBS proves its loyalty to Google Video. [LA Times]
Okay, so Robert Scoble was the "big-name blogger" who wanted his evil back — turns out he even blogged it. The pain of discovering this scoop's old age was mollified by the discovery of Google: Evil or Not? [EvilorNot]
Linus Torvalds joins the "Sliding Scale of Evil" movement [CNet]

Google actually apologized for making Google Video so lousy. Marissa Mayer came right out and said "We made a big mistake." Google's already scrambling to promote CBS shows on the front page, as Mayer says it should have done from Day One. Since when does Google apologize for half-baked services? Doesn't beta mean never saying you're sorry?

The tip of the inverted pyramid becomes Techdirt's lede when the Wall Street Journal tacks this onto a Google Video piece: