YouTube is the number one video site in the land yet again. According to a poll conducted by Nielsen Media and Beet.tv, the Google subsidiary had roughly 5.4 billion total views and 82 million unique users in the month of September. The big news, however, has nothing to do with who is number one. In a surprising turn of events, Yahoo Video was able to grab the number two spot, with 264.2 million views and 30 million unique users — an astonishing 59.1% increase from the previous month. Many insiders believe that the popularity boost is due to Yahoo’s unique “quality over quantity” approach to online video. Other video sites listed include Fox Media/MySpace (242.4 million views and 19.2 million users), MSN/Windows Live (164.7 million views and 11 million users), and Nickelodeon (163 million views and 6.15 million users).

To many users, the illegal downloading and sharing of media files are the “dark side” of the Free Line. If you feel this way, then you have a new ally in the fight — the French government. In an overwhelming 297 to 15 vote, the French Senate passed a so-called “P2P three strikes” anti-piracy bill. According to the bill, a new government agency known as the High Authority for Copyright Protection and Dissemination of Works on the Internet (or HADOPI) will be created to monitor all of the country’s Internet connections. If a user is convicted of online copyright infringement three times, HADOPI will have his or her Internet privileges revoked. Critics argue that the punishment does not fit the crime. The French National Assembly has yet to vote on the bill.

In other news, text messaging is coming to Gmail. The folks over at Gmail Labs are hard at work on a plugin that will allow users to send text messages from their mail accounts. The service initally launched last week, but was quickly taken offline after a few major bugs were found. “When you’d try to turn it on, it wouldn’t fully enable,” writes product manager Leo Dirac in the Official Gmail Blog. “We thought about keeping it out there — bugs and all — but the experience wasn’t that great. So, in the spirit of Labs, we’ve pulled SMS chat back to fix it.” Dirac expects the new service to up and running again “in about two weeks.”

In other news, it seems as if the usually mundane task of web searching is about to get a bit more social. Scour (formally known as Aftervote) is a new search engine that allows users to view results from Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search, then rank them in order of relevance. Aside from the distinct social aspect, users also have the opportunity to get paid for their work. Each search query, vote, comment, and recommendation is worth a point. For each set of 6500 points, the user gets a $25 gift card. Despite the similarities in the name, Scour has little to no connection to the domain’s previous tenant, music downloading pioneer Scour Media. Scour is up and running now.

Elsewhere, blogger Jack Humphrey has written an interesting piece about attracting more people to your blog. According to Humphrey, the key is to let your personality shine through. “The majority of successful blogs share one thing in common: people follow the blogger, not the blog,” he writes. “If personality weren’t important to building more than just a casual following for your blog, why would so many people who have reached the big time in blogging feel the need to pass on what they feel is a pretty important factor in their success?” Interesting and thought provoking, Jack Humphrey’s article is perfect for anyone who wants to shake things up a bit.