Youtube decided to use so called overlay advertisements on selected videos which are seen as the first step to monetize Youtube. The ads seem to be ten second flash animations that appear at the bottom of the video in almost transparent form stopping the video playback until the user either clicks outside of the ad to resume the video or on the ad to be taken to the advertisers website.

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, Music and Video

Turkey is once again in the news with yet another ban of a famous website. While they banned all of Youtube for videos that made fun of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk they now decided to ban Wordpress.com because of a handful of blogs that supposedly insulted the Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar.

Categories: The Web

If you ever wondered how so many users are able to watch hundreds of videos that are published on Youtube on a daily basis you might want to consider using a service like SlapVid which offers previews of the daily top 25 videos at Youtube.

Categories: Music and Video, Online Services, The Web

Kids, let that be a lesson to all of you who are thinking about doing the same thing. A 20 year old unemployed man named Ryan Fitzgerald who is still living with his father had some time at his disposal and decided to help people who needed to talk to someone by publishing his phone number on the popular video portal Youtube. He received more than 5000 calls and text messages after uploading his video on Friday saying that he would be there for everyone who wanted to contact him.

Categories: Cool, Entertainment, The Web

Youtube Sunday it seems. We all know that Youtube likes to cooperate with everyone who looks a bit like authority and takes down videos pretty fast. It does not always have to be copyright infringement, it can also be original works of art that some authorities like the Turkish or Thai government want removed from Youtube pressuring the site with a countrywide ban. (man I love the Turkish interpretation of Democracy and free speech)

Categories: Entertainment, Funny, The Web

Youtube Videos which are also used on sites like Myspace or embedded into blog posts sometimes take ages to load which results in freezes and stuttering which can only be solved by pausing the playback until the video is fully loaded. There is a possible way that would accelerate the download of the youtube video by up to five times. This is done by the free software Speedbit Video Accelerator which builds up five different connections to the video server to speed up the streaming of the video. This method does not help if you are already using the maximum bandwidth available of course.

Categories: Browsing, Firefox, ie, The Web, Tools

All of my friends hate the flv format that Youtube and other social video sites such as dailymotion and break use to show video content on their websites. Most download managers, like the Firefox extension Video Downloader, offer the flv files as downloads which most multimedia players do not support at all. You could add a flv plugin to add flash video support to your media player but there is an easier solution to this.

Categories: Online Services, The Web

You might know that Youtube held a video awards voting on their site for the last five days were everyone was able to vote for their favorite videos that Youtube preselected. Ten entries were shown and you could assign spots from 1 to 10 to them. Now, after all votes have been cast Youtube presents the Winners of the 2006 Video Awards in the categories Most Creative, Best Comedy, Best Commentary, Best Series, Best Music Video, Most Inspirational and Most Adorable. The videos below are in the same order in case you are wondering.

Categories: Cool, Entertainment, The Web

Youtube is still a great video site that hosts an incredible amount of videos that can be viewed online. Youtube is on the other hand missing some key features that would make it a even greater experience. I’m not only talking about video downloads but other small features that that would increase its usability. A stop button that would stop the download of the video, a possibility to change the size of the video output and a way to get rid of certain elements that one does not really need on Youtube.

Categories: Browsing, Firefox