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.

I've just debuted a new website/blog designed to be a resource for ideas, tips and advice for online news publishers. It's called GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com, and it's NOT another industry news blog. The focus is exclusively on advice. I hope you'll find it useful.

I soft-launched the site yesterday, so hardly anyone knows about it. I'd love it if a few of you checked it out and maybe commented on the early posts. My intent is to post a tip a day. There will be ideas on how to increase traffic and earn more money, primarily. I'm aiming for actionable tips and advice.

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."

The highly touted online series about a group of young artists bombed in its NBC debut on Tuesday night, drawing the network's lowest ratings and smallest audience for that time slot in at least 20 years, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The show ranked a distant third place for the 10 p.m. hour, averaging just 3.1 million viewers and a meager 1.3 rating among advertisers' favorite demographic, adults aged 18 to 49, the precise audience for whom the series was designed.

The program had been scheduled to move to Sundays on NBC starting March 2.

But two sources close to the program, though not authorized to speak publicly about its scheduling, said "quarterlife" has been removed from the NBC lineup.

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.

In response to questions from CNET News.com, Angela Gyetvan, Revver's vice president of marketing, said: "I'm not at liberty to discuss any of this with you. I can't comment."

Mark Elfenbein, LiveUniverse's chief operating officer also declined to comment.

Revver gained some notoriety in 2006 when video-sharing became a worldwide craze. YouTube dominated the sector but Revver tried carving out a niche by catering to videographers.

The company, backed by such investors as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Bessemer Venture Partners, and William Randolph Hearst III, offered to share advertising revenue with makers of the most popular clips. The thinking at the company was that if Revver could win over the best creators, audiences would follow.

Famous in the early 1990s for his hit song "U Can't Touch This" and very baggy trousers, Hammer is launching a website that hopes to rival YouTube.

Due to debut later this month, DanceJam will allow users to share and watch their own dance videos.

If the website is a hit, it could help Hammer's finances - he went bankrupt in 1996 with debts of almost $14m (£7m).

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."

She's dominated TV talk for decades. Her recommendations send shockwaves through the publishing industry, She's even conquered Broadway. And now, Oprah is set to go viral.

Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Prods. has announced a partnership with YouTube to launch a new Oprah channel on the video site. The new channel, which went live Friday, features a collection of supplemental video from "The Oprah Winfrey Show," including backstage footage, highlights from guests' appearances, and even videos that Oprah has shot herself.

To help kick off interest in the new partnership, Oprah has booked YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen to appear on her show Tuesday. Oprah will also feature several YouTube-discovered stars on the program, including Tyson the skateboarding dog and Judson Laipply, the creator the much-streamed Evolution of Dance clip.

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.

NBC got buzz for a revived Saturday Night Live and The Office, and YouTube, through the sheen of legitimacy NBC gave it, got a $1.65 billion buyout. With NBC set to launch its own video site, the laughably named Hulu, the pulling of the YouTube plug was just a matter of time. Speaking of time: Could this move be a sign that Hulu, scheduled for "private beta" testing this month, is finally ready?

The Internet search giant is expected to introduce a service on Tuesday to allow Web sites in its ad network to embed relevant videos from some YouTube content creators. A Web site or blog specializing in hiking, for instance, might choose to embed hiking videos from YouTube.

The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google's network, known as AdSense. Since the videos will be surrounded by ads, the service is another way for Google to cash in on the huge number of video clips stored on YouTube.

Several other networks distribute videos and ads on the Web, but none reach as many Web sites as AdSense.

Google said it would share revenue from the ads with the creators of the videos and with the Web sites that embed them, though it declined to specify what percentage of the revenue will be kept by each party.

Ads have been run along side a very select few user channels on the YouTube site for a handful of months but these reports indicate that the program will be made much wider and be taken off of the site all around the web.

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..."

Romney, the lone GOP holdout, has posted more videos on his YouTube channel (283 as of Sunday afternoon) than any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat. But he has resisted the debate, in which videotaped questions are submitted through YouTube. In an interview with Manchester Union Leader, Romney said, "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."

That drew a video response from Billiam, the snowman who questioned the Democrats on global warming last month in their YouTube debate. This time, he riffed on another Romney quote from the campaign: "Lighten up slightly."

Sources at CNN said the debate, co-hosted with the Republican Party of Florida, will be held at the Mahaffey Theatre in St. Petersburg. Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, said that more than 1,100 videos have been submitted, and the popular video-sharing site will allow YouTube users to upload their videos until Nov. 27.

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.

Google has said that it hopes to have technology in place by September that would prevent copyright-infringing videos being posted on YouTube, its video-sharing site.

A lawyer for Google told a judge presiding over a copyright action that YouTube was working "very intensely and co-operating" with content-producing companies to introduce video-recognition technology that would detect illegally copied material before a clip is posted.

At present, companies must find illegally uploaded videos themselves and alert Google, which will then take them down.

Philip Beck, who is representing Google in the action, told a judge in Manhattan that the filtering technology would be introduced "hopefully in September". He said that Google hoped the technology would "eliminate such disputes in the future."

Even though users can submit their own questions, CNN is ultimately in charge of picking the questions that are going to be asked. Still, this is a promising development. According to an article on CNN.com, there is a small committee at CNN that is in charge of selecting the questions. David Bohrman, Senior VP for CNN and a member of the selection committee said, "There are questions that we, the journalists, we, the mainstream media, would never think to ask in the presidential debate."

The fact that this debate is even happening just goes to show the enormous impact that user generated-content has had on society. Ten, even five years ago, something like this would have had no chance of happening. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out and hopefully this type of debate becomes more typical in the future.

No one's more surprised at this robust Web presence than Paul himself, a self-described "old-school," "pen-and-paper guy" who's serving his 10th congressional term and was the Libertarian Party's nominee for president in 1988.

"To tell you the truth, I hadn't heard about this YouTube and all the other Internet sites until supporters started gathering in them," confessed Paul, 71, who said that he's raised about $100,000 after each of the three debates. Not bad considering that his campaign had less than $10,000 when his exploratory committee was formed in mid-February. "I tell you I've never raised money as efficiently as that, in all my years in Congress, and all I'm doing is speaking my mind."

That means saying again and again that the Republican Party, especially when it comes to government spending and foreign policy, is in "shambles."

But while many Democrats have welcomed the young and fresh-faced Obama, who's trailing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in most public opinion polls, Paul is barely making a dent in the Republican polls.

Republican strategists point out that libertarians, who make up a small but vocal portion of the Republican base, intrinsically gravitate toward the Web's anything-goes, leave-me-alone nature. They also say that his Web presence proves that the Internet can be a great equalizer in the race, giving a much-needed boost to a fringe candidate with little money and only a shadow of the campaign staffs marshaled by Romney, McCain and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

This past weekend's worldwide Live Earth concert might eventually impact the rising water level caused by melting glaciers, but it has already been a "watershed" for simultaneous video streams.

By Saturday afternoon, MSN said it had set a new record for the "most simultaneous viewers of any online concert ever," with 10 million streams.

The event represents a "milestone in live Internet broadcasting," said Joanne Bradford, MSN chief media officer. She predicted "an even greater number of streams" as viewers return to watch on-demand footage of the performances of about 100 artists, which will be available at LiveEarth.MSN.com for the next several weeks.

But while videos on the CAP and road safety are barely getting touched, a clip of sex scenes from European cinema has become a runaway success.

Titled Film Lovers Will Love This!, it shows men and women having sex in different ways and places, and ends with the words, "Let's come together."

Supporters say it celebrates European cinema, but others term it "soft porn".

British Conservative MEP Chris Heaton-Harris told BBC News the European Commission was wasting taxpayers' money.

"They do have an image problem but I think cobbling together 44 seconds of soft porn on the internet is not a brilliant way of solving it," he added.

You can think of it as TV on Cliff's Notes. Each 'minisode' is three to five minutes long, but Sony and MySpace have assured skeptical viewers that the story arc of the original TV episode remains intact.

On the Minisode Network, you can now watch three shaved-down episodes from a total of 15 TV shows. Many of them, like Starsky & Hutch and Charlie's Angels, predate the average young MySpace user, but a few, like Dilbert, are a bit newer. According to a release from MySpace, new ones will be added each week and more than 500 total will be online by the end of 2007. It's not clear whether this means that new shows will be added as well or if the 'minisodes' will remain restricted to the current 15.

The video site, owned by Google, has launched nine versions across Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK.

Each site is translated into local languages and has country-specific video rankings and comments.

"Video is universal and allows people around the world to communicate and exchange ideas," said Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder.

The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google, will help content owners like movies and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner's permission, the company said on Monday.

The so-called video fingerprinting tools will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.

YouTube has also been testing technology to help identify the audio tracks of video clips with major record labels using technology provided by privately held Audible Magic as early as the first two months of 2007, the company said.

It turns out that success in the new-media world depends on a lot of the same things as in the old-media universe. Just as in Hollywood, becoming a hit takes talent, effort, timing and some luck. Sex appeal is just as valuable online as off. And getting noticed by the "mainstream" press also helps build buzz. With over 900 reviews on Yelp.com, posting reviews online isn't as much about stardom for Megan Wade, it's about talking up local businesses like Weird Fish.

Most important, though, is the way Internet stars exploit the power of the Web. They employ all the social-networking tools available on new-media sites like Google Inc.'s YouTube, inviting fans to comment on their work, link to it and even copy it. And they draw on email, subscriptions and other tools to alert fans about new offerings.

"The most popular are the ones who have really tapped into the social fabric" of the Internet, says Jamie Byrne, head of product marketing at YouTube.

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When "Rocketboom" went online in late 2004, the idea of a video blog -- posting commentary and news in video form instead of regular text -- was still novel. Andrew Baron, the program's producer, says that the program had a small but loyal audience of about 700 daily viewers within a few weeks of launching.

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 tod