Directly Sharing YouTube Video with orkut

YouTube recently has added a orkut sharing button to the list of sharing thumbnails. Previously, you had to copy & paste the video URL to post the clips to your orkut favorite videos. Now you can simply share your favorite videos using orkut sharing button directly from YouTube.
Previously, YouTube promoted only 2 social networks - Myspace and Facebook - so now with adding the orkut thumbnail.

YouTube now promotes orkut as well as the other ones, even though Google owns orkut.

YouTube New Feature: Video Annotations

YouTube just added a new feature that allows you to add interactive commentary to your videos. Video Annotations(as a beta feature) let you add background information, create stories and link to related YouToube videos, channels or search results from within a video. Video Annotations are completely controllable, so you can control where/when the annotations appear and disappear or turn them off.
Adding annotations is simple. Once you logged in and started playing one of your video, you will see "Add Annotations" button on the right side of the player. Clicking on the button brings you to the editor where you can add annotations. After finishing adding annotations, just publish your video and preview.

Here's is an example video published with annotations.

YouTube Video Annotations
YouTube Help center

Announcement of VFS/YouTube's Scholarship Competition Winners

As with my last post, VFS the Canada's premier post-secondary entertainment arts institution and YouTube just announced the winners of one-of-a-kind scholarship competition - a three-minute video making about the theme "What Matters To You".
A couple of weeks ago VFS announced the top ten finalist whose videos were to vote until May 27. YouTube also mentioned to announce for three winners who will receive full-tuition scholarship to one of VFS's world-class programs. Today, after a week voting, YouTube announced the three winners of the VFS/YT Scholarship Competition:

1. Jorge Rolando Caneda Estrada(Digital Design)
2. Stefan Ramirez Perez(Foundation Visual Art & Design)
3. Christopher Harrell(Digital Design)

Here's a playlist of three winners' videos:

The YouTube Blog

VFS: Scholarship Competition

"Vancouver Film School(VFS) is Canada's premier post-secondary entertainment arts institution and one of the most distinguished in the world. The 14 production-oriented programs at VFS span one year or less and cover all aspects of visual media. Students are guided by industry veterans as they create the professional-quality reels and portfolios that get them noticed on the global stage. Recent VFS graduates have gone on to work on some of the hottest properties in entertainment, from film to animation to video games".
Now Vancouver Film School(VFS) and YouTube present an unique scholarship competition and both together are offering an one-of-a-kind scholarship competition, so the so-called "What Matters To You" program includes following categories:

• 3D Animation & Visual Effects
• Classical Animation
• Digital Character Animation
• Houdini™ Certification
• Acting for Film & Television
• Digital Design
• Entertainment Business Management
• Film Production
• Game Design
• Makeup Design for Film & Television
• Sound Design for Visual Media
• Writing for Film & Television
• Acting Essentials
• Foundation Visual Art & Design

VFS has announced the top ten finalist and now you can vote for your top submission until May 27. YouTube will vote for three winners who receive full-tuition scholarship to VFS.

The YouTube Blog
VFS's YouTube channel

YouTomb As A Research Project For YouTube

MIT Free Culture, a student organization at M
IT built an interesting research project called "YouTomb".
There are a lots of videos on YouTube which aren't available for viewing or downloading because of copyright infringements. YouTomb is a research project that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.

"More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm."

Google OS

YouTube New Added Features

YouTube recently added some new features for searching, massaging and contacts.
YouTube Suggest functionality works like Google Suggest, so it borrows a lot of trick from Google Suggest. This option was added a couple of weeks ago, but it has been working on YouTube UK. Now it's available on YouTube main page. To enable the function, you need to click the "advanced" link next to the search button and check "Display query suggestions as I type". After doing it, every time you start to write for search, a box drops down showing you query suggestions.
The next new added option is Google contact importer on the My Contacts that lets you to import your Google contacts into YouTube. By importing your Google contacts, you can:

• Quickly send a video to any of your contacts by clicking on the "Share" button when watching a video
• Quickly send a video to any of your contacts by clicking on the "Share" button when watching a video
• "Friend" your contacts on YouTube. If they accept, you can stay up-to-date on the videos your friends are favoriting, rating, and uploading in your personalized homepage!

The other new feature is Inbox improvement for comments. "Comments made to your videos are separated from comments left in response to your comment on someone else's video"(read more).

YouTube Help Resources

Google Marketer's Playbook Video Educational Materials

Google AdWords Agency recently posted seven videos to Google Business Channel on YouTube as educational materials captured from Google Marketer's Playbook sessions at ad:tech San Francisco:

• Introduction to AdWords
• Managing your AdWords account
• Optimization strategies 1
• Optimization strategies 2
• Measuring & tracking: Google Analytics
• Increase your advertising reach: Traditional media
• Online video advertising

"The Google Marketer's Playbook is a new series of educational talks where our experts discuss strategies for making the most of AdWords and other Google products helpful to advertisers such as Google Analytics and YouTube"(read more).

Google AdWords Agency Blog
Google Adwords
AdWords Learning Center
AdWords Help Center

Building an embeddable interactive timeline of videos with TimeTube

TimeTube is a tool that lets you to see YouTube videos timeline, so the history of YouTube videos in one glance. TimeTube is a great looking YouTube mashup and it may be easier for you to find videos than YouTube itself.

Just search YouTube for a keyword over TimeTube to get results placed on a timeline. You can build an embeddable interactive timeline of videos for any topic.

Dipity
YouTube Data API
Featured Project on Google Code

Matt Cutts & Spam

"Matt Cutts works for the quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam"(Link).
Matt Cutts joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. He is currently the head of Google's Webspam team. In this video Matt Cutts talks about spam.

Matt Cutts on YouTube.

YouTube Features Are Now Live

After announcing the beta version of Inbox and My Contacts about two weeks ago, YouTube has just announced that the features are now live for all members. There are also some changes to the Inbox based on your recommendations. "Now mini-thumbnails appear on the list of messages for video responses and videos users have shared with you. Also, the link to view all comments has been restored in email notifications for comments made to your videos and responses to comments of your own"(The YouTube Blog).

Read also on Mashable!

YouTube New Player Beta

YouTube recently added a new player that looks beautiful. The changes are that two buttons have been removed and the volume control now works by up/down arrow.

YouTube probably tests this player.

Read also on Google OS.

A Trick to Find Topics from Google Help center

Google Operating System Blog today has added an useful post in order to how to find a topic from Google Help Center easier. I found it very useful, because sometimes for me it was complicated to find a specific topic in whole hierarchy of Google Help Center.
The simple trick is appending "?fulldump=1" to the address of a Google help center to get the topic directly.

Here are some help topics by using this trick:

• Gmail Help
• Google Calendar Help
• Google Docs Help
• Google Reader Help
• Google Video Help
• YouTube Help
• AdSense Help
• Analytics Help
• Google Desktop Help
• Picasa Help
• Google Toolbar for IE
• Google Toolbar for Firefox

Read more on Google OS.
Google Help Center.

YouTube New Feature "YouTube Suggest"

YouTube added a new feature that shows query suggestions in the search box. While you're typing characters, the search box scrolls down showing some suggestions to help users to find what they're looking for. YouTube Suggest is an auto-complete feature that functionality works like Google Suggest, so it borrows a lots of tricks from Google Suggest.

The new function doesn't works on YouTube's main site, so it's currently available on YouTube UK and works only over homepage.

Read also on Google OS.

YouTube Feature Updates

YouTube beta version launched with three new feature updates. The YouTube Blog with these tests plans to improve overall management of messages, contacts and videos.
"These tests are already being served to a small percentage of randomly selected users, but anyone can choose to opt in and test them out."

Get started clicking the following links here:

• New Inbox
• My Contacts
• My Videos

Read more.

Trick for Watching Restricted Videos on YouTube

You could have seen the videos on YouTube are restricted in you country. In this case YouTube displays messages as follows:
"This video is not available in your country." or
"This video or group may contain content that is inappropriate for some users, as flagged by YouTube's user community. To view this video or group, please verify you are 18 or older by logging in or signing up."
The trick to get them watched is changing URL a little bit as following; e.g. if you get a restricted video with URL like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID

You just need to replace it to this:
http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEOID

As you're seeing, it's simple to understand the changes, so what you only need to change is to take away "watch?" and replace a "slash" with "=" as above.

With this simple changing you will launch "you to the player used by YouTube when you embed the video into a web page and this player doesn't perform country verifications and can't detect if you're logged in."(Google OS)

Read more and see the screenshots on Google OS.

The YouTube Partner Program

The YouTube Partner Program brings you to cash in on your creativity. You create independently your original videos for online streaming, get your own copyrights and distribution rights of all your uploaded videos and become a partner.
"Becoming a partner gives you the ability to share in ad revenue from your YouTube videos."
The YouTube Partner Program now is propagating over Japan, Australia and Ireland, so more and more are becoming membership.

There are three reasons why become a partner:

• Effective revenue sharing
• Widest reach
• Non-Exclusive agreement

Find out more about YouTube Partner Program.
Take a look at current content partners.
Read more on The YouTube Blog.
Apply now.

YouTube Community Guidelines.

Download YouTube Videos

Actually there are a lots of ways to download videos from YouTube. In order to this I added an article showing 2 Simple Ways To Dowanload YouTube Videos you can download YouTube videos with. Now I'm going to introduce some other ways. The first one is similar to that first way added in my last article, so like just putting "mp4" in the URL after "youtube". The other way is to replace "voobys" with "youtube". It dose the same like appending "mp4", so it launches you to an exiting site you will download the video from.

Good thing is that you get the video much easier.

Note that you will get the video as mp4 file. You also can convert your video using Voobys Search and Converter the new feature of voobys.

Other way is to copy and past the URL of the video you want to the search bar of this site.

Viddownloader.com with a nice platform is another one you can use to download videos. Not only videos from YouTube!

On April 13, Google OS added an article Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files.

Other ways.(videos)

YouTube Fast Search

With YouTube Fast Search you can create your playlists dynamically. At the same time you're creating your playlist(simply drag & drop from search result), you can drag & drop video you want to play into the block above. As you see on screenshot below, you can also pause, enlarge and slide the current playing video.

The cool feature is that you can create video wall. Clicking on VideoWall will launch you to another page where you can search and get results to create video wall.

Through scrolling down of the main page where you were creating your playlist, you will find two another features that you both can add video search to Google Toolbar and get the script. Clicking on Get this script will launch you to another site where you can get the script.

All you need is to include the javascript and set your CSS with adding this code where ever you want to add a few videos - to for example a blog post.

See instructions and examples here.

There's also "the option to add videos to a Quicklist and then play all the videos from the list, but you need to switch from the view mode to the search mode"(Google OS).

YouTube APIs and Tools.
Get started with YouTube Fast Search.

YouTube New Design of User Interface

YouTube added two tabs for commentary and showing statistics & Info in a new container under video pages. The first change you'll see is the new layout of Share, Favorites, Playlists and Flag into a dedicated tab driven box, so clicking on each item will expands out. The design of sharing option has also been updated and will be appear to top display depending on persistently using of sharing option.

It is also to mention that the search result page has been updated too and the option to sort results by popularity is back.

Read more on Google OS.
Read also on TechCrunch.

YouTube Stats for Videos

Google added a feature called “YouTube Insight” to YoutTube. Some statistical data as an availability of a new video statistics package free for anyone. You find this feature by logging in your account -> My Videos Page, clicking on "About this video" button to view a chart that shows the number of daily views and the evolution of your videos' popularity.

“Uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time.”(Official Google Blog).

Read more on Blogoscoped.
Read more on ReadWriteWeb.