Michael Moore’s latest documentary film, Slacker Uprising, is set to be available for free on the Internet. Does this signal a change in the movie industry or just Moore’s desire to see Obama in the White House?

When Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, for free over the Internet last year, it was seen as a forward-thinking step which could revolutionise the way music is distributed.

Changing The Status Quo?

The album did well, but most people still ended up downloading it via less legal means. And the experiment didn’t really do anything to end the monopoly that the big record companies enjoy.

Could film-maker Michael Moore do any better in persuading the movie industry that there is an alternative to releasing movies in to cinemas?

As anyone who surfs the World Wide Web on a daily basis couldn’t have failed to notice, today was April Fools Day, and some video sites got involved in the pranking.

The biggest and best one was by market leader YouTube, who decided to take the RickRolling phenomenon and take it global and mainstream.

What Is RickRolling

RickRolling is the trick of getting someone to click on a link to go to a story or page related to the subject at hand, maybe in a forum thread or chatroom.

However, instead of the link that is expected, you’re taken to an image or video of Rick Astley performing his one and only hit from the 1980s, Never Gonna Give You Up.

More vloggers are setting up their own video blogs on independent blogging platforms, causing an overall decrease in the percentage of vlogs on YouTube, according to a quarterly Mefeedia survey.

The number of independent vlogsites are up a total of 7% this quarter. The popular vlogging platform Blip.tv seems to have benefited the most from this shift, registering a 17% rise in just three months and now hosting 56% more vloggers than YouTube.

When it comes to the top video sharing websites on the internet the following websites are freqently mentioned:

• YouTube
• Blip.tv
• VideoEgg
• MetaCafe
• Dailymotion
• Veoh
• Google Video
• Grouper
• Jumpcut
• Eyespot
• MSN SoapBox
• MySpace Video
• AOL Uncut Video

So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick look to see just how popular these video sharing sites really are, and how their popularity compares.

I’ve just done this quickly using Alexa rank, its not the most accurate, but its the best we’ve got really. Here are the results: