I remember my brother showing off a new device in the late 1990s that let him navigate the Internet on the television. Back then, there were no dogs riding skateboards on YouTube or NBC dramas on Hulu, but the technology from WebTV appeared to be a breakthrough in the convergence of the two mediums.

The frustrating thing about WebTV was that the dialup connection was so slow–at times crippling–that you often sat on the couch waiting minutes for a page to load. Plus, the resolution on TVs then was far from hi-res, and the lack of multimedia on the Web made the task rather boring.

Fast forward more than a decade: While you can now search the Web at lightning speed on the tube, watch television shows online at will and view Internet videos with clarity on any screen, companies are still struggling to come up with a business model for the Internet-connected television market.

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Eager to expand use of the Web to advertise their products, pharmaceutical giants, including Eli Lilly (LLY) and Pfizer (PFE), are heading to Washington this week to call on the Food and Drug Administration to provide guidelines for marketing prescription drugs online.

Wayne Gattinella, CEO of WebMD, is among the drug-industry leaders expected to attend Thursday’s FDA hearing on online advertising.

Drug companies are dabbling with Internet advertising, but their efforts have been minimal. Most of the ads promote broader health or corporate initiatives, rather than individual medicines. That’s chiefly due to industry fears of running afoul of regulators.

Seeking a bigger piece of one of the country’s largest ad categories, Web companies including Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and WebMD Health (WBMD) are also planning to attend Thursday’s hearing at the FDA, which has been scrutinizing drug makers’ digital marketing efforts.

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Is a computer with no disk drive and no applications software still a computer?

Litl LLC, a small Boston company, says its eponymous Litl device is the future of personal computing. Litl is a Web computer with a full keyboard and an operating system designed for people who use online software like Google Docs and store their photos on Flickr or Shutterfly.

On its screen, a viewer sees 12 business-card-sized Web pages. Clicking on the desired page expands it to full screen, and the user can read the page, buy shoes or build a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have icons, files or menus of its own.

The device can also be flipped up into an A-frame so the screen is visible to show photos, videos or text-news feeds that can be seen from across a room.

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Google’s (GOOG) troubles in China seem to have taken a new turn as a result of the company’s plan to create a vast digital library of books.

The China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) has called on Chinese writers to stand up for their legal rights in the face of Web search giant Google’s proposed book settlement, according to a post published on the official Web site of Chinese Writers’ Association (CWA).

CWWCS claimed to have found copyrighted works written by a number of Chinese writers scanned and posted to Google’s digital library, Google Books.

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Hearst today launched LMK.com, a low-cost Web roundup on topics from college football to reality television.

(For the youth-challenged, “LMK” is the texting shorthand for “let me know.”)

LMK joins a crowded field of aggregation sites, which cull news and information from across the Web and organize them by topic or in other user-friendly ways. Other aggregators include Topix, Newser and Daylife, and sites like the Daily Beast that combine aggregation with their own content.

LMK will be nearly entirely automated, with just one full-time employee. Initially, the most developed part of the site is about college football, with news, blog posts, photos and statistics. It will roll out new topics every few weeks.

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Who takes down your email and Flickr accounts after you’re dead?

As we increasingly live life on the Web, services are popping up to help people manage their online lives after they die. At the same time, regulators are cracking down on privacy violations for the deceased.

VitalLock.com offers an application that lets people encrypt personal messages on their computers and send secure messages to people now or after they die. The goal is to give people a safe way to share account passwords, wills and other important information, said founder Bob Stewart.

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If you’re running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner (IT) thinks you might want to make sure your employees’ avatars aren’t dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

“Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments,” a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report “Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success” explained.

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Google’s (GOOG) search algorithm works on a simple principle: on the web, sites link to other authoritative sources, and the more sites link to something the more authoritative they think it is. That’s great if you’re dealing with sites that actually follow that rule–as the vast majority do.

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The Web can be a mean-spirited place. But when it comes to online reviews, the Internet is a village where the books are strong, YouTube clips are good-looking and the dog food is above average.

One of the Web’s little secrets is that when consumers write online reviews, they tend to leave positive ratings: The average grade for things online is about 4.3 stars out of five.

People like Jonas Luster aim to introduce a little negativity. A private chef, Mr. Luster recently beckoned fellow San Francisco area diners to “quit with the nicey-nicey” in a blog post titled “In Defense of Negative Reviews.” His own average rating on restaurant-review sites is 3.6. He even awarded celebrity chef Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant a 1-star rating after he felt he had been served an overdone duck.

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When it comes to hauling in venture capital, Twitter has vaulted into the ranks of some notorious losers–remember Webvan?

In just two years, Twitter has raised roughly $155 million in venture capital, including $135 million this year. That’s a staggering sum for a revenue-less company that operates on the Web where capital-efficiency is underscored and technology costs are falling.

It’s even more unbelievable when you look at where Twitter ranks in the annals of venture funding.

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International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) will try to sell a new package of low-priced computer desktop applications to companies and governments in Africa, challenging Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and other rivals in the region.

IBM, which has been pushing into developing markets like Africa and Asia as mature markets slow, said the package–which includes basic programs like word processing and email–would be made available to customers via remote “cloud computing” facilities, meaning users could access the programs from the Web. It would cost $10 per month per user, and can run on so-called netbook computers, or low-cost PCs priced around $300.

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Senior House Democrats told the Federal Communications Commission Thursday it should do more to stop Internet providers from playing favorites among content providers, brushing aside opposition from Republicans and some large telecom firms.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said at a hearing Thursday that he will put his weight behind a “net neutrality” bill introduced by Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass, and Anna Eshoo, D-Calif. The bill would prevent Internet service providers from blocking or prioritizing legal content on the Web.

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After decades of wrestling for dominance in the U.S. shipping industry, United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) and FedEx Corp. (FDX) are squaring off on another front: the growing world of online printing.

UPS is rolling out marketing Monday to highlight a push into Web-based printing, in which clients can send documents such as business presentations to UPS retail stores via the Internet to have printed copies made. FedEx already offers online printing at its FedEx Office/Kinko’s locations.

The competing retail chains, acquired by the two shipping companies earlier this decade, serve small businesses and executives who frequently travel. In addition to shipping packages and documents, the more than 6,000 stores combined offer services such as packaging, photocopying, printing business cards and notarizing signatures.

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SB Nation, the network of sporting sites owned by Sportsblogs Inc., is getting a makeover focused on real-time updates, a bid to increase traffic between its Web properties.

The redesign went into effect late Wednesday and includes a “storystream,” similar to Facebook’s news feed, that wraps up articles, blog posts, videos and other content about hot topics like Melanie Oudin’s U.S. Open advance and Brady Quinn’s starting for the Browns on Sunday. Editors monitor news outlets, Twitter feeds and SB Nation’s sites for each storystream and keep them frequently updated, said Jim Bankoff, the company’s chief executive.

A recent storystream on Allen Iverson’s move to Memphis, for example, pulls from Sports Illustrated, ESPN, a Reebok commercial on YouTube and one of Mr. Iverson’s own tweets. “Effectively what we’ve created here is a blog on the Allen Iverson story,” Mr. Bankoff said.

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Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer Gary Reback made his case against the Google Books settlement Tuesday, arguing that the settlement is illegal but could be remedied if the Justice Department insists that Google (GOOG) license the books it scanned to competitors.

In a court filing on behalf of the Open Book Alliance, a consortium that opposes the settlement, the attorney argues that the settlement between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers gives publishers and Google monopoly control over the pricing of digital books. Reback, who was involved in spurring the Justice Department to bring an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 1990s, co-founded the consortium along with the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that is trying to create a digital archive of the Web, last month. Many members of the consortium, including the Internet Archive, Amazon.com (AMZN), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT), have filed their own briefs opposing the settlement too.

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