YouTube's story takes you back to the days of the tech bubble, doesn't it? The company's young founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, scored several million in venture capital, and the following year, sold their creation for a cool $1.65 billion. Clearly, that speculative excess in the late '90s didn't exhaust our supply of optimism, but if anyone can make YouTube work, it's probably Google.

Despite its popularity (delivering 100 million video clips a day), YouTube has yet to prove its money-making potential. Its content is freely donated, its success a result of its feel for community and the zeal of its users to train their video cameras on almost anything that moves. What isn't taped by amateurs is largely clipped from copyrighted materials such as movies and TV shows. How Google leverages that audience will be fascinating to see.

But ponder this. Video has one glaring deficit: search.

Finding a video can mean sorting through the tags people assign their productions when they submit them. But a lot of effort is going into better methods that will allow computers to examine the video itself (San Francisco-based Blinkx is a big player in this area).

And what better company to take video search to the next level than a search giant with Google's credentials?

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Video isn't just getting smaller, as in the short clips that populate YouTube's servers; it's also getting more portable.

Lately I've been looking at a RoverTV, a tiny media player from Doghouse Electronics. I'm not used to putting on my reading glasses to watch television, but with them in place and the RoverTV's 4-inch color screen at about book distance, the video it offers is crisp and colorful, and the quality of the accompanying sound is excellent.

The advantage of a device like this is that you can take your video with you, using the included earbuds, much like any MP3 player. The range is impressive -- the RoverTV can play a large number of video and audio formats, from MPEG-4 video to MP3, WAV and WMA audio files and standard formats for image files like JPEG, BMP and GIF. But the unit is also a video recorder that works with a timer to record television shows, and it includes a built-in FM radio.

RoverTV gradually won me over despite occasional pixelation in the image of some video files I transferred from my PC. Normally I would have scoffed at the idea of video on such a small screen (I certainly felt that way about the video iPod), but keeping a movie in your pocket has its charms.

The device's rechargeable battery will provide about six hours of screen time, and you can upgrade the 2-GB SD card that comes with the unit. Two models are available starting at $299 (www.rovertv.com).

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Google's foray into video isn't slowing down its continuing work on other projects. Now the company has updated its Reader program, a Net-based news feed aggregator, and the product is so good that I've moved away from my PC-based reader to use the online offering.

News feeds move through the magic called Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, and aggregators are the programs that display them. The beauty of news feeds is that you can subscribe to the material on a particular Web site and receive updates whenever something new appears. Moreover, you can get five, ten or a hundred sites' news feeds all delivered on the same screen.

I track hundreds of news feeds on-an-off in writing this column as well as in my other work, and the savings in time is enormous. The new Google Reader (reader.google.com) sets up easy options for finding the feeds you want, letting you search by topic or use one of the preloaded bundles of feed content. Or you can simply plug in the URL of a known feed and go. I sometimes set up a Google search on a particular topic and then paste its news feed into Google Reader.

The result? Whenever something on my topic moves on Google News, I get notified in the Reader program. To do this, run a search on Google News and note, at the top left of the results page, the link marked RSS. You can right-click on that item to copy its URL, then paste the address into Google Reader.

Google's video foray is interesting, but when I need to get research done, Google Reader is becoming the product I turn to to make sure I'm up to date.