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If you're a casual browser of the Web, it's understandable if you're not paying close attention to the torrent of original video content floating around YouTube. For brands, however, the throngs of madly devoted YouTube subscribers are becoming harder to ignore.

Take FreddieW, the geek friendly YouTube channel that bills itself as "just some cool dudes making sweet vids with rad FX!" While the bro-y tagline might not scream mainstream, FreddieW's numbers do. With 4.6 million subscribers and almost 800 million views across YouTube, FreddieW recently inked a sponsorship with Dodge, which will have a featured role in the second season of the company's popular Video Game High School series. And if blue-chip car sponsors weren't enough, the YouTube sensation just raised $808,341 off of 10,613 backers on Kickstarter, setting a record in the film and video project category.

Freddie Wong, the creative force behind the channel, initially looked down more traditional avenues for funding before deciding on the crowdfunding route. "We looked at private equity but then got to thinking, 'Why should we give up a piece of our company when we can get it funded elsewhere?' It became difficult to justify when we thought we could raise it through the fans."

If you listen to music, the state of recorded sound may strike you as healthy and robust. Whether you hear it in a club, on the radio, on mp3, compact disc or LP, and whether the recording was made last week or decades ago, the sound is solid and the experience can be immersive. But historians of recorded sound have long been fretting about the relative delicacy of that sound, or more specifically, of the media on which it is stored. And anyone who has listened to transfers made from early cylinders – the dominant format for the first quarter-century of recordings, before the invention of the flat 78 rpm disc – or who has tried to play a digital file in an obsolete format, understands their concerns.

These worries, and their ramifications for the national legacy, became a matter of government concern when Congress passed the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000. That bill directed the Library of Congress to “plan and coordinate a national effort to develop policies and programs to save our nation’s recorded sound history and ensure its accessibility to future generations.” Now the library and its National Recording Preservation Board -- which includes musicians, composers, musicologists, archivists and representatives from the record industry -- have announced a plan meant to streamline the ways recordings are archived and made available. All told, the 78-page Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan, which was completed in December 2012 and released on Feb 13, includes 32 recommendations.

Google is coming under fire just as regulators in the U.S. and overseas are stepping up their scrutiny of how all the players in the industry -- mobile apps, stores, advertising networks and others -- handle consumers' private information.

Regulators are pushing for greater transparency of what information is collected by apps and how it's shared. Google Play has worked differently than Apple Inc.'s iTunes since it launched in October 2008. An app developer sets up an account through the mobile payment system Google Wallet, which makes them a merchant in the store. When someone buys his or her app from Google Play, that transaction -- and the customer's information -- is sent to the developer. The developer has to comply with rules about what he or she can do with the information. But at Apple, iTunes is the merchant. App developers say they never receive customer information. Google defended how Google Play operates. "Google Wallet shares the information necessary to process a transaction, which is clearly spelled out in the Google Wallet Privacy Notice," Google said.

Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) plans to introduce legislation that would require researchers who receive federal funding to post their final publications online for free.

Matt Dinkel, a spokesman for Rep Doyle, confirmed the congressman plans to re-introduce the Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill he has offered in previous years. The legislation would require all federal agencies that have an external research budget of above $100 million to require their grant recipients to post their articles online for free within 6 months of publication in any peer-reviewed journal. The issue of public access to academic research has gained more attention since Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide last month.