Valleywag reported in January that the May-December couple — he's 64, she's 28 — had switched the location of their wedding from Hinze's paparazzi-friendly Sydney to the more remote Necker Island. Now PEHub, a venture-capital blog, confirms that the couple are wedding on Necker.

The notion that Necker will keep the ceremony private seems curiously outdated, though, in this age of oversharing. After all, when Larry Page, the Google founder, married Stanford Ph.D. and ex-model Lucy Southworth in late 2007, one of the wedding guests sent Valleywag a close-up pic of the couple's first kiss (left).

Better yet: Since YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley is Clark's son-in-law, we'd hope guests would be sporting videocameras, the better to leak clips with.

Another famous guest, according to the Daily Telegraph: Film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Hinze hosts the Australian version of Project Runway. She spent the past few days at Walt Disney World celebrating with her sister and other family members.

Taken as a whole, the Googlers' cash is one of the largest corporate donations to Obama's inaugural committee. Marissa Mayer, an early Google employee who now oversees its search engine, and David Drummond, the company's top lawyer, also donated, as did YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley and Dick Costolo, the former CEO of FeedBurner, an advertising startup acquired by Google last year,

Unlike election spending, donations to cover the expenses of an inauguration are relatively unlimited. Obama's committee has capped donations at $50,000.

It's a time-honored way to win influence. Michael Dell, CEO of the eponymous computer maker, gave $250,000 for George W. Bush's second inaugural in 2004.

That the Googlers are paying up shows the IPO-borne wealth of the company's top executives; the closeness of their ties to Obama, who has cited Google's management style as an inspiration for the structure of his campaign; and the company's maturation as a political player in Washington, D.C. Eric Schmidt's oddly late endorsement of Obama, weeks before the election, was the culmination of this process. And this injection of inaugural cash is just a down payment.

What do they want in return? One of the last acts of the Bush Administration's antitrust cops was to nix a deal for Google to sell ads on Yahoo's websites. With Google set on expanding its dominance of online search advertising into other fields, is it any surprise that its executives would welcome their new best friend to the White House?

Hinze, the host of Project Runway Australia, was first spotted on Clark's $100 million megayacht, the Athena, two years ago, while Clark was wrapping up a $125 million divorce settlement with ex-wife Nancy Rutter, a former Forbes reporter, PEHub notes. Small world: Hinze will be YouTube founder Chad Hurley's stepmother-in-law. He's married to Clark's daughter Kathy.

There's more than a hint of desperation around YouTube's scramble. And that's as it should be. Google, in its early days, scrambled around for a business model; at one point, it thought it might do enterprise software, which is how it ended up with Schmidt, a former computer scientist, as a CEO.

Mistakes happen.

And that's the point: YouTube needs to make mistakes, lots of them, fast. Google's advertising business is, for now, gushing cash, giving YouTube some room to maneuver. But shareholders are not infinitely patient. The more ways YouTube tries to make money, the better the odds it will happen on something that works. It needs to carefully measure what's working, and tweak its efforts. This kind of mind-numbing lather-rinse-repeat gruntwork is actually something Google is good at; feed its engineers data, and they'll come up with an algorithm for success. What Google can't afford to do is waste time chasing some impossibly elegant solution which springs, full-grown, like Minerva from the skull of Google god-king Eric Schmidt.

The efficiency of communication is deeply correlated to the time it takes for data to be accessed and transmitted. Text based data will always be faster to access and transmit than video based data (not just talking the web here), and therefore will be more efficient. Text is already highly accessible and ubiquitous, and anyone who thinks video is going to replace text is not only an asshole, but probably retarded.

Chad Hurley is a douche bag who got lucky and got rich. The company he built hemorrhages money and has done nothing but create an outlet for outcasts and undesirables to communicate their nonsense in a space insulated from society. YouTube is nothing more than an expensive mental institution.

This is almost as ridiculous as when Zuckerberg referred to Facebook as an OS. Fucking lucky idiots.

Hurley claims his own site's "exponential growth" means video is becoming the dominant means of communication — not just for news and entertainment, but for everyday communication between individual people. He ignores the real-world evidence that people vastly prefer text-based communications — email, IM, phone texting — rather than the video tools built into nearly all new computers and most phones. Because he's rich and works for Google, Hurley's claim will be widely quoted today, and conveniently forgotten in ten years. Here's what no one will ask him: Chad, why did you post your world-is-changing claim in text, instead of uploading a video? (Photo by AP/Danny Moloshok)

Nonsense. How typically self-important of Internet users, to think that Viacom cares about the dozens of South Park videos they watched. Viacom is not being disingenuous in saying it never meant to violate Internet users' privacy, I've come to believe.

So why are they seeking the data? The case revolves around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives Internet service providers a "safe harbor" for hosting copyrighted content. But that protection rests on the notion that the people who operate a website don't really know what's on it.

If Viacom can show YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, or other top officials, viewed copyrighted content while logged into the site, wouldn't that weaken YouTube's rights under the DMCA? Even worse, what if Hurley or Chen uploaded copyrighted clips themselves?

Tellingly, in reaching a deal to protect YouTube users' privacy, Viacom and Google excluded data about YouTube and Google employees' use of the site.

Google's best defense might be to go negative, airing reports about Viacom executives' use of the site. That might not give YouTube any more legal protection — but it would make its legal foes squirm. Viacom's Ifilm subsidiary, for one, has been caught hosting copyrighted content without permission.

There's one thing that might save Chad and Steve: They've never seemed that interested in online video. The pair, both former PayPal employees, stumbled onto the idea, and conceived of YouTube first as a site to host shopping videos for eBay listings, then as a video-dating site. They've always been more interested in cynically exploiting online video as a business than exploring the potential of the medium. An announcement of Google's sale to YouTube is one of the few times the two actually made an appearance on it.

So there's the irony: The less Chad and Steve used YouTube, the more likely they'll come out of this lawsuit unscathed. But Viacom's legal strategy suggests that every video they viewed will count against them.

My questions include whether or not creators can choose to distribute downloads with or without digital rights management; whether YouTube will handle the stocking and shipping of DVDs (unlikely); and beyond that, if creators will be able to leverage YouTube and tools like Google Checkout to sell other "merch" related to projects. But even better tools for leading traffic from videos to creator's web sites would be welcome. More details from the press release at NewTeeVee and Silicon Alley Insider.

Previously:

• A is for Adelson, who cofounded Digg
• 
  
• B is for Botha, who sold YouTube big
• 
  
• F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"
• 
  

"I never thought I was going to date an older man," Hinze told the Australian magazine. Clark's daughter Kathy is 10 years older than Hinze — and married to YouTube founder Chad Hurley. Hurley's site currently only has one video of his prospective mother-in-law, but that's sure to increase after her TV career takes off.

Not many in the Silicon Valley money crowd support Hillary Clinton. The notable exception is John Doerr, who now counts former VP Al Gore as a colleague at Kleiner Perkins.

The list is lengthier for Barack Obama.

• David Anderson, managing director, Sutter Hill Ventures
  
• John Thompson, Symantec CEO
  
• Gordon Eubanks, former Symantec CEO
  
• Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse
  
• Former California gubernatorial candidate, current Steve Jurvetson pal and Tesla Motors board member Steve Westly
  
• John Roos, CEO of law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
  
• Google execs David Drummond and Marissa Mayer
  
• Google.org director Larry Brilliant
  
• YouTube founder Chad Hurley
  
• VC Doug Hickey of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
  
• VC Stewart Alsop of Alsop Louie
  
• Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitielo
  
• Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Michael Moritz
  
• Craiglist founder Craig Newmark
  
• Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andreessen (who also supports Mitt Romney)

(Photo by azrainman)

"YouTube is an illicit organization built upon a self-destructive philosophy," Lodwick writes, calling Youtube's copyright policies "evil." Now that YouTube is owned by don't-be-evil Google, those are fighting words.

Lodwick also mocks YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley for managing to upload all of two videos the past year. Lodwick himself uploads videos every couple of minutes. And, if you're into publicity stunts — like the one about the Vimeo employee who met the girl of his dreams on the subway and then created a Web site to find her — they can be entertaining.

But Lodwick has to understand, Chen and Hurley are much to busy counting to 1.65 billion to make videos about televised fights with their girlfriends.