• 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.

We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:

For some, like Michael Buckley, the self-taught host of a celebrity chatter show, filming funny videos is now a full-time job.

Mr. Buckley quit his day job in September after his online profits had greatly surpassed his salary as an administrative assistant for a music promotion company. His thrice-a-week online show "is silly," he said, but it has helped him escape his credit-card debt.

Mr. Buckley, 33, was the part-time host of a weekly show on a Connecticut public access channel in the summer of 2006 when his cousin started posting snippets of the show on YouTube. The comical rants about celebrities attracted online viewers, and before long Mr. Buckley was tailoring his segments, called "What the Buck?" for the Web. Mr. Buckley knew that the show was "only going to go so far on public access."

"But on YouTube," he said, "I've had 100 million views. It's crazy."

Improved thumbnails - To make sure your thumbnail represents your video, your choices will now be selected algorithmically. You'll still have three thumbnails to choose from, but they will no longer be auto-generated from the 25/50/75 points in the video index.

Shhhhh VP be quiet. Let YouTube keep shooting themselves in the foot. It makes them feel like they are improving the website. Why let users make sure there is a steady but related center shot, when they can provide 3 perfectly good blurry possible center shots randomly?!!

I understand that you are trying to avoid situations where people abuse the system and game the thumbnails, however this new process is an extreme misfortune to partners. Thumbnails help us brand our content, just like a cover to a cd or DVD. I have spoken to many other partners and all of us are very disappointed with this announcement. Many of us do vlogs or music videos, and we are more than likely going to end up with an unattractive thumbnail mid-sentence with the subject's mouth wide open, a goofy face, or motion blur that no one will want to click on. Even with three options, that is simply not enough. Video thumbnails play a key-role in whether people choose to watch our videos or not. We as partners should have the right to ensure that our thumbnail image is interesting and choose what we want to creatively represent our content, as long as it goes with the video. Many other video sharing platforms such as Revver and Vimeo offer at least 15 thumbnail options. Ifilm, Spike.com, and Vimeo even offer the ability to upload our own choice of thumbnail. Perhaps you might want to think about offering this as a feature exclusively to partners, so that we can still optimize branding. Even a slider that would allow us to pick any frame from the entire video would be very beneficial. I ask you to please consider these options. The new system is a huge disappointment as far as branding goes. I'm really hoping you will hear our side on this. Thanks

"In addition to their official (house.gov) Web site, a member may maintain another Web site(s), channel(s) or otherwise post material on third-party Web sites," the new House rules read. They also allow members to provide links to or embed outside content on their official sites, provided they include an exit notice indicating the visitor is leaving the House.

The Senate rules also allow for links to be added to official sites. They allow senators to use any third-party site of their choice, but the senators will have an "approved list" of sites for reference.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the change "a significant step forward toward bringing House rules into the multimedia age and allowing for members to effectively communicate with their constituents online."

Outsiders have long considered live streaming as a logical next step for YouTube, which dominates the market for pre-recorded Web video. Co-founder Steve Chen gave credence to the idea himself in February when he told Pop17's Sarah Meyers: "Live video is something we've always wanted to do but haven't had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google we hope to launch something this year."

But our source says that Google (GOOG) has never really seriously considered a live video service. We're told that the notion was discussed months after Chen's statement, but that the idea was tabled, for a variety of reasons. Chief among them: It would add significantly to Google's infrastructure and bandwidth costs at a time when it's trying to prove that the $1.65 billion it paid to buy the company will, at some point, pay off.

We're told that YouTube execs estimated that if just 10% of the service's users took advantage of live streaming, the company would have to add 20% to 25% to its huge server and bandwidth infrastructure to support it. Given that advertising dollars for live streaming are even scarcer than they are on conventional Web video, that's a significant investment with minimal near-term return. YouTube's sales team is still trying to figure out how to sell the inventory it already has.

As you probably guessed, we're big fans of anything that lets people interact with online video and gives the YouTube community the chance to express themselves in creative ways. New features such as Video Annotations, which allow you to insert comments and information into the video itself, are just one example of how we're beginning to expand what you can do with your videos on the site.

It's in this spirit that we're thrilled to announce Google's purchase of Omnisio, a small California-based startup that's focused on making online video more useful and collaborative. The Omnisio team has tremendous technical expertise when it comes to advanced video tools and having this kind of talent at YouTube should help us further explore ways to enhance your YouTube experience.

YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture 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.

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.

BBC News has learned that the outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW.

A leading net professional said the global outage was "probably a mistake".

Pakistan ordered internet service providers to block the site because of content deemed offensive to Islam.

The BBC News website's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan's citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site.

Among the older clips is footage from a film by Lord Wakehurst called Long to Reign Over Us, which has never been released to the public.

The former Tory MP, who died in 1970, was a keen amateur film maker and charted many key royal events, including the death of King George VI, the Queen's accession and her coronation.

The site also has footage of Queen Alexandra's West End tour among the rose-sellers in 1917, and silent newsreel of the 1923 wedding of the Duke of York and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon - the Queen's parents.

Announcing the launch of the channel, a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said the Queen "always keeps abreast with new ways of communicating with people".

"She has always been aware of reaching more people and adapting the communication to suit," she said.

"This will make the Christmas message more accessible to younger people and those in other countries."