YouTube Charts
One of the things that I do not like that much about YouTube is the fact that several key pages and services are not linked directly on the main page of the video hosting portal. This includes the music group page and also the charts page on YouTube.
YouTube Charts, which you can access here, offers various top listings. This includes the most viewed videos, most liked or most discussed videos. If you open the YouTube video charts page for the first time you will notice that it offers several filter menus to change what is shown on the page.
This begins with the All Categories pulldown menu at the top. Charts are displayed from all categories by default. You can change this to display the charts from one category only, for instance gaming, science & technology or sports only.
Two additional menus with filtering options are displayed right beneath that. The "most viewed videos" menu can be changed to display the most discussed, most liked, most viewed HD or top favorited videos instead. The Today menu to display the top videos of the week, month or even all time instead.
Each video is listed on the page with a large thumbnail, its title, uploader and the views that it has received. You can play individual videos or click on the Play All button to watch all videos in a playlist one after the other.
If you thought that was all then you are wrong. YouTube by default filters the videos it displays on the page by country. If you are from the US you may see different videos as someone from the UK, Germany or France.
You can change your location at the very bottom of the page. Here you can select one of the support countries or a worldwide listing.
If you ever wanted to know what's hot in Israel, Australia or Taiwan then here is your chance to do just that. It is however likely that you will encounter many foreign language videos if you do that.
The charts on YouTube can be used to find out the next hot music gig, upcoming games that everyone is talking about or the latest gadgets. The charts are on the other hand mainstream charts which becomes especially apparent in the music category.
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Okay, what is it with these HTML5? I found it more of a processor-hogger than flash.
Do you think that Google is prepping for HTML5 with all these recent changes to YouTube, Martin?
I do not think that Google will stop supporting Flash on YouTube in the next years. They will however add more HTMl5 only contents to the site. They cooperation with Adobe (Flash in Chrome) has likely something to do with it as well (we give you new Flash versions earlier and you continue supporting it).