The easiest way to understand VEVO is that it is to music videos what Hulu is to TV shows: a corporate (in this case record labels) founded, ad-supported way to aggregate and serve up videos on the Web. Instead of having to wade through all the user-made junk on YouTube to find the real, high-grade and high-quality music videos, VEVO's channel features only label or artist-produced videos, with great sound and video quality (though not HD yet).

• Speed matters: Videos should load and play back quickly.
• Clip culture is here to stay: Short clips are voraciously consumed and perfect for watching a wide variety of content.
• Open platforms open up possibility: Content creation isn't our business; it's yours. We wanted to create a place where anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an Internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world, and in many cases make a living from doing so.

The idea behind the platform is simple: In addition to the microvideos, which can be uploaded from a webcam or a mobile phone camera and pushed out via Facebook and Twitter with a few short lines of text, Robo.to is meant to be a digital calling card online or a hub that houses information about an individual's identity on the Web. That's what helps separate the service from other microvideo services like 12seconds.

• Alana Taylor's song called "The Twitter Song" debuted in April, 2008 - there's also a cover of Alana's song here by Jen Borok.
• Lisa Nova has a Twitter song called "Twitter Whore."
• Mary Hodder and Joshua Levy performed a Twitter song based on "The Hammer Song" at the the Personal Democracy Forum.
• The most recent Twitter Song is Ben Walker's song called "The Twitter Song."

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Today we're taking our first step towards answering these questions with YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account -- users, partners, and advertisers -- to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload. For example, 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. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks. For now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the "About this Video" button under My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.

The analytics data is really basic and doesn't include a lot of interesting information like the sites that embed your videos, the most important sources of traffic, how many people view the full video or play it again etc.

In a packet of emailed information, YouTube pointed out that its partners (which include established users and media companies) can utilize the Insight stats to increase their revenue. But to truly offer useful analytics YouTube needs to show the relations between videos, track search engine keywords, and measure the portion of a video a viewer watches before clicking away, among other things. YouTube did say it will soon add in referrer logs to show how viewers discovered a video.

ikill4u784 says, "OMG! it cant sneak up as most views in less than a week. i've never even seen this with 25m views b4!"

Chargrad says "What... The... Hell... even with hot hot sex in the title how can this have got so many views?!?"

mattjsrules says, "This only had 4 million views 2 weeks ago wtf? someone must of refreshed it 80 million times or someone hacked."

In a constant effort to improve the user experience and incorporate your feedback we'll be making a number of large changes to the site over the next few months. In addition to making improvements upon existing features, we'll be rolling out some brand new items that are still in the works. We can tell you there is a lot to look forward to, but in the meantime we offer you this sneak preview of the new YouTube video browsing page (our "Videos" tab) and invite you to share your feedback with us.

-- Categories will now be found under the "Videos" tab.

-- Dropdown menus make for a smoother transition when clicking through popular pages, ie. "Most Viewed," "Top Favorites," "Recently Featured," etc.

-- Tabs and video browsing pages have a new overall look and feel.

But don't hold your breath. That impassioned young fellow is Chris Crocker, a 19-year-old from Tennessee whose 15 minutes (seconds?) of fame just might not quite be over: Variety is reporting that a television production company, 44 Blue Productions, has inked a deal with him for a potential TV show. It's not totally serendipitous, as the entertainment site explained that Crocker has actually had a sizeable MySpace following for some time now, and that he's been on 44 Blue's radar for almost a year.

Today we are releasing video uploading to Blogger! This feature allows you to upload videos and create a video podcast with the same ease that we currently provide with photo uploading.

When you go to the Blogger post editor, you'll see a new button () next to the image uploading one. Just select a video from your computer, wait a few minutes for the upload and processing to occur, and voila! Now when you visit your blog, you will see something like this (of course without Tomo, the Blogger Akita):

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed that we've been working with select partners to improve YouTube's presentation of advertising on their videos in a manner that brings you creative, compelling content and should also increase revenue flow to artists and content owners.

So what's new? Today we're offering select partners the ability to incorporate YouTube InVideo ads into their content. These are animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you're interested by what you see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you were watching is temporarily paused.) If you choose not to click on the overlay, it will simply disappear, so that you're in full control of your YouTube experience.

• jernov: "i personally don't like it that much, but it's better than an advertisement movie playing in front of the video you want to see, making you wait for the whole thing to start. i don't like it, but it could be worse."
• 123woow: "i think its a good idea people will see the advertisements more often and they cant really complain about it annoying them or being intrusive to the video because you can manually click it away easily. Good job YouTube"
• randiicom: "I'm okay with this, but eventually it would get boring. I wouldn't subscribe to anyone who does this, but it wouldn't stop me from watching one of their videos. It'd be great though to get money for the videos you've made."

• johnbrouwer1: "It wrecks your youtube video! Terrible TERRIBLE idea!"
• sjmaerz: "I knew the team at Google would find a way to screw this up. Goodbye, YouTube, it was fun while it lasted."
• splitforces: "gawd advertising is in everything now. first it wuz comerrcials in the middle of my shows and now the middle of my fav online videos. i shall unsubscribe to any1 who would do that."
• losereligionrem: "sounds dumb... if i wanted to see advertisement... i'd just watch tv..."

An amateur video of an amazing animal confrontation on the African savannah is fast becoming one of the biggest hits on video-sharing website YouTube.

The footage first shows how several lions attack a group of buffalo, snatching a buffalo calf.

As the lions wrestle with a calf by a watering hole, a crocodile joins in the battle, pouncing on the buffalo.

The lions win the tug-of-war, but then the buffalo herd returns, chasing away the lions and freeing the calf.

In essence, Lucasfilm is going to legitimize and streamline a pastime that has become increasingly popular on the Web. A search for "Star Wars" on YouTube, for example, turns up some 98,000 results, many of them videos drawing on original content from the movies. But on third-party video sites, Lucasfilm executives "can't control it, and they can't monetize it," says Jim Kaskade, Eyespot's chief executive officer.

While Lucasfilm could fight what amounts to the theft of its property, it has now decided to take the opposite tack. In doing so, it is tackling an issue that faces all media companies today: how to keep some semblance of control over intellectual property in the digital age.

"We see what's going on at YouTube," says Jeffrey Ulin, senior director for distribution and business affairs at Lucasfilm, who says the company began to think about allowing mash-ups last summer. "We see what's going on out there on the Web generally. And we wanted fans to come to Starwars.com as the center of fan activity." Currently, he estimates, the site attracts about two million unique monthly visitors; he anticipates the new content will boost traffic significantly.

The clips, which run up to 60 seconds long, will assemble memorable moments from the movies, grouped under categories like "Leia Confronts Vader" and "The Lost Limbs" -- the latter a collection of various characters' limbs getting the chop. One category devoted to a much-maligned lizard-like character from the three "Star Wars" prequels urges fans: "Don't be shy. Here's your chance to edit Jar Jar."