YouTube hits one billion views a day, impressive - isn't it ?

When your website first reaches a million visitors, it’s a great milestone. However, one billion views per day can only be attained by the selected few, and YouTube is now one of them.. YouTube is now serving over one billion views per day as it celebrates the third anniversary of being acquired by Google.

It seems like just yesterday that the co-founders of YouTube sold the site to Google. In fact, it was a full three years ago that Google decided to ante up $1.65 billion for the fledgling online video site.

We found out just yesterday that Google CEO Eric Schmidt thought that price tag was around $1 billion out, with the site actually worth more like $600 million. But Google wanted the site so badly it was willing to pay a premium for it.

According to the official blog, YouTube is serving “well over a billion views a day”. That’s at least 11,574 views per second, 694,444 views per minute, and 41,666,667 views per hour. Imagine the web server farm that can withstand that much traffic, and then remember that YouTube is just one of Google’s many properties.

To celebrate the occasion, YouTube has a special logo today, accompanied with the text “1 billion views per day”. Yes, they’re bragging, but one has to admit they have a lot to brag about.

YouTube video: How to install a PSPgo game

Just wanteed to go through the peocess of getting games from the Playstation Network cards over to the PSPgo. Pretty straight forward, but I'm glad I did it with you guys, I didn't know it would take as long as it did. Anyway more to come, Enjoy.

TSUNAMI SAMOA 29/09/2009 VIDEO

Tonga earthquake triggers tsunami threatening Tonga, Samoa and Fiji

The quake, which hit at 6.17 am local time (1817 GMT), was centred 130 miles south-southeast of the Tongan capital Nuku'Alofa and 300 miles southeast of Ndoi Island, Fiji.

It struck at a depth of 6.2 miles, the US Geological Survey said.

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A tsunami warning was issued by the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre for Tonga, Niue, Kermadec Islands, American Samoa, Samoa and Fiji.

"An earthquake of this size has the potential to generate a destructive tsunami that can strike coastlines in the region near the epicentre within minutes to hours. Authorities in the region should take appropriate action in response to this possibility," the centre said.

Local radio stations in Tonga broadcast warnings that a tsunami was possible and that people should move away from coastal villages, but police cited locals who said no big wave had been reported.

World's Longest Basketball Shot, Wow !

THIRD DECK OF KYLE FIELD VIEW of the World's Longest Basketball Shot
-From Texas A&M University's Football Stadium



Comments:

"There are simply too many variables to see this from a scientific angle. However, it is possible to look at it from the video editing side of things. And i must say it is sound. There are no visible cutaways and the ball stays in the shot the entire time. It has TWO angles that are identical in timing and structure. And this utube video looks so authentic that it would have taken awesome software to do. Not to mention movies studios cannot get the quality this would require if it were fake. It is real."

"I have not played basketball and football many times in my life. Ive never tried to throw a basketball as long as I could. I honestly have very little knowledge in this. I admit that. Plus it was a long time ago I studied physics but I know the higher you are the long you can throw it."

"Unfortunately man, yes it can be fake. Remember the commercials of Lebron making full court shots over and over in the Gatorade commericial? A little thing called a computer makes it possible. There is powerful software that can do this. I'm not saying its 100% fake, but you can't rule out the possibility."

YouTube video: Fan Makes An Epic Goal In Saturn 2 1 Spartak Moscow

It looks real, but I am skeptical because I know at least in the EPL those stewards would be running the guy down. And the fact they were on the field for about 35 seconds at least with no one doing anything leads me to believe this was a fake.

YouTube video: Susan Boyle - Semi Final 1: Memory from Cats - Britains Got Talent 2009 (HQ)

Comments:

"Susan Boyle is absolutely amazing
I would buy any and all CD's she makes
You go Susan
Don't let any negative comments destroy
your dream
You truly are the best of the "best"
Karen"

" was thinking to my self, i thought, "self, what else can Susan Bolyle do after the performance that she auditioned with?" well thank you for the answer. that was awesome, congratulations in your continued success."

"she must have felt so much pressure...the whole world waiting for her next performance, but she was soo good, especially after the instrumental. i was blown away. and she looks so good!
i think she'd make a brilliant Mme. Thénardier from les mis!"

"Good Lord, folks! Give the woman a break! She is not a professional singer - she is an amateur with a voice from the angels. I think it just makes her more endearing that she started off with one, only one, bad note and the rest was pure ectasy. I will buy every CD she ever makes and, like others, would happily stand in line to do so. Her voice is beyond words."

YouTube video: 05/12/2009 - Southwest Airlines Jet's Wheel Catches Fire During Landing In Texas

{NO AUDIO} A Southwest Airlines Jet's Landing Gear caught on fire after landing at Houston's Hobby Airport, forcing passengers to evacuate. - 05/12/09. If you like exciting Utube videos you should check out this one:



Comments:

"Why zoom out during the best part of the landing when the action was happening camera man? Bravo! Then we get 5 minutes of it sitting there burning. Meh."

"Didnt need foam. In a class A fire (rubber) water has much better cooling effect than foam. Foam is for flammable liquid fires. The Rosenbauer truck has a switch that would start foam flowing in about 3 seconds if it had been needed. "Attendance" time? I guess you mean response time. There was absolutely no forewarning...and because of that, they were not at their standby positions."

"Look at all the people hauling all of their crap off that airplane. LEAVE YOUR STUFF BEHIND! All of it. No purses,no laptops,no nothing. Stand up, follow directions to evacuate, jump down the slide. You pulling items out of the overhead or out from under your seat may cause a delay that may cause injury or worse to other passengers. It also can cause issues going down the slide, like chasing papers around at the bottom of the slide and blocking egress. LEAVE YOUR STUFF BEHIND! I preferr funny clips..."

"Another interesting video on U-tube - in most caes the crew waits for the firefighters. Only they can see from the outside and can say where exactly the fire/dangerous area is and which emerg. exit the best is for the evac. Only in case of an high risk crash down or complete damage of the aircraft the crew use all emerg. exit for the passengers... "

"Pilots must complete the evacuation checklist which usually takes 1-2 minutes and usually the pilot will confirm again with the tower that the fire still exists before starting the evacuation, people get hurt in evacuations so if you can avoid one is better, so that is why any evacuation will take 1 or 2 minutes to initiate."

"As we can see on the video it's a simple fire, caused by a mechanical malfunction. Trained airline professionals ask everyone to deplane, and leave your belongings behind. The video clearly shows the selfishness and stupidity of several individuals. Had this been a serious emergency, lives may have been lost while those who thought their briefcase was more important than their safety."

YouTube goes educational

Uncomfortable desks, crowded classrooms and inflexible schedules may be a concern of the past as the popular Web site YouTube recently launched a new section of its site that is strictly dedicated to helping users get free access to educational content that is uploaded by universities and students. With more than 100 schools involved in the new YouTube EDU project, the public can easily scan through videos that range from entire lectures to college events and are categorized by the most viewed clips, most subscribed and are also organized through the directory for each college and university.

“If teaching was just content delivery then we wouldn’t need faculty,” Harding said. “I’m not saying there’s not a place for lecture because they are an important tool, but just videotaping a 50 minute lecture and putting it up doesn’t necessarily cause an increase in learning.”

Assistant professor Steven Hart is one that follows this teaching philosophy and has used TeacherTube as a resource to instruct his students for the past three years.

“It was initially designed for teachers because of all the content that’s on YouTube that may not be appropriate for schools,” Hart said. “So these are teachers who could upload videos to share with colleagues or if they come across an interesting video they’d like to share.”

Hart believes that using video and online sources as supplemental teaching aides allows his students to become more interactive with the content as well as provide a visual model that can physically demonstrate techniques through the videos. He also explained that the hybrid approach of incorporating the lecture aspect and technology-enhanced methods into his classes is the best option for all learning styles, which isn’t necessarily true for his past courses that were strictly online.

Students that signed up for online courses weren’t basing their decision off the idea that it would be a great learning tool, but because of the convenience and flexibility it allowed, Hart said. And although the classes are taught void of the person-to-person contact, he explained that students could still communicate with their peers and the instructor through discussion boards, which may pose as a problem for YouTube EDU viewers.

An expert's guide to YouTube by Josh Lowensohn

In the past, we've done Newbie's Guides for certain services, but we wanted to switch things up and really dig into a product's advanced features.

Video-sharing site YouTube is the perfect service to start with because it's massively popular and incredibly simple to use, but also has a few powerful features that are tucked away. This guide is to help you learn how to use some of these advanced features and to serve as a simple reference page.

For the sake of simplicity, we're only covering searching, viewing, and sharing. We've skipped uploading since it's pretty straightforward and made simple with the service's recently launched multifile uploader. We're also not including any third-party downloading tools because that is against YouTube's terms of use and is already an official first-party feature on some content.

Searching


Using YouTube's search tool:
YouTube's search engine works a lot like Google's. In fact, it uses the same search operators to let you tweak your results. Here are some worth remembering the next time you're looking for a video:

• Limit to words in the title. Putting "allintitle:" in front of your search keeps YouTube's results limited to those videos with the matching words in the title. This is great if you want to keep it from searching through descriptions or tags. Not so useful if the video you're looking for has a misspelled or misleading title.

• Exclude a term. Add a "-" then the word you want to exclude will keep it out of the results. So if you're searching for explosions but don't want to see videos with diet Coke or Mentos, you'd type in "Explosion -diet -coke -mentos." Be sure to add the "-" in front of every word you don't want.

• Play the wildcard. If you're too lazy to type a word, or think that YouTube will figure out the words you're leaving out, you can just put in an asterisk in place of that word. In practice, this means that searching for something like "Fallout: Broken Steel" you could just type "Fallout * Steel" and have it guess the word in the middle.

If you can't remember these off the top of your head you can find them in YouTube's advanced search box, which shows up as an option in the results of any completed search. It's also worth going there if you want to filter how long the videos in the results should be. This is a great way to find long-form content that's 20 minutes or more.

Search and browse with your eyes.
If titles and thumbnails are not enough, you can explore additional, related video clusters by using YouTube's warp feature. This is a feature that can still be found on some utube videos, but YouTube has since relegated it to its TestTube section. That doesn't mean you can't use it on any old video though. Simply inserting "warp.swf" in the URL instead of the word "watch" will send you into full-screen "warp speed" mode. To read more about how to use this feature check out our coverage of it.


To warpify any video just change the watch in the URL to warp.swf, and you get a special treat.

Third-party search tools
There are a handful of third-party YouTube search engines and tools that add a little bit of utility on top of YouTube's search. Here are some of our favorites:

• YouTube Fast Search lets you play the video right next to the results, as well as create a playlist by dragging and dropping videos from the results page. It's also got a cool feature called VideoWall that creates a giant canvas of thumbnails, which you can play just by clicking on them.


• CoolIris, which works on iPhones and computers alike, also presents videos in a giant wall that can be browsed or searched. You simply click on the thumbnails you want to play.

• The YouTube search Firefox add-on. Puts YouTube's search engine in your browser, and uses Google's Suggest API to give you suggestions as you type.

• VideoSurf gives you visual summaries of YouTube's funny videos (and other video services). If it's a movie or TV show you can search by actor, and all videos get a visual time line so you don't waste any time waiting to see what's on that 10-minute clip.

• Search The Tube is a search engine that only shows videos that can be embedded off YouTube. Keeps you from finding that perfect video that can't be stuck on a blog post.

Viewing

Watching videos on YouTube seems pretty straightforward, but if you want to enhance the viewing experience there are some official, and unofficial, tools that can tweak the presentation.

Setting YouTube to automatically play the high-quality version
You've got to be logged in to make this work. Simply go to YouTube's playback settings (when logged in) and pick the "I have a fast connection" option. The next time you play a video it will automatically switch over to the higher quality stream. Worth noting is that this doesn't yet work for HD videos; you still need to click on the HD button to make it switch over to that stream.


Choosing this option makes YouTube always play the high-quality stream.
(Credit: CNET Networks)

Make HD videos fit the screen better
Viewing a video in HD resizes from the standard 710-pixel player into one that's 950 pixels wide. It still doesn't go to the edges of the page though. To get that extra 100 pixels or so you can install this small Firefox add-on that resizes them to fix the rest of the YouTube UI. Of course you could always just hit the full screen button, but this lets you access all the other page elements while it's playing.

Turn down the lights on any YouTube video
A select few YouTube videos have the option to "turn down the lights," which darkens the rest of YouTube's UI and shows you just the video. If you want to make this option available on all videos you can download YouTube Cinema for Firefox, which can do this for you automatically. It also lets you change the background color.

See also Quietube (story) and Theeter (story), which do the same thing using a special bookmarklet you can add to your browser. However, unlike the Firefox extension, both of these services require using the bookmarklet to turn it on when you're browsing videos on YouTube proper.

Sharing

Watching videos on YouTube is a no-brainer, but if you want to control the way viewers see your videos or videos you're sharing, there are some handy tweaks.


YouTube recently introduced a relatively simple way to do this using tags. During or after an upload you have the option to add tags, and this is where the magic happens. Adding one of the below tags has different effects on your video, which gives you complete control over how it looks:

Controlling the size of the video by cropping or scaling:
• Add "yt:crop=16:9" This zooms in on the 16:9 section of the video, and gets rid of any black bars on the side or on the top of your video.
• Add "yt:stretch=16:9" takes any content that's been shot in anamorphic (with the black bars on the top and bottom) and scales it to fit the wide-screen player.
• Add "yt:stretch=4:3" scales widescreen videos to fit a 4:3 player.

Changing the default quality of the stream:
• Add "yt:quality=high" makes it so that the default quality level is the highest, whether that's HQ or HD. It depends on what type of content you've uploaded.

How to control the start time on a shared link or embed
With some small URL tweaks you can control the start time of a video when shared as a basic link, or when embedded. YouTube is likely to add this as part of the embedding options at a later date. In the meantime, the below methods are helpful if you want to share a specific part of a long video.

For basic links:
The time you want the video to start must be appended by hand with #t=_m_s at the end of the video's URL. You have control over the minutes and seconds, which are what go where the underscores are. So, for this URL www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfkxBVIJ0vc#t=0m21s, the video would start 21 seconds in.

Here's a video of how to do it:



Deep linking in YouTube from Josh Lowensohn on Vimeo.

For embedded videos:
Skipping ahead in embeds is a little harder than with basic URLs, but still manageable. Copy and paste the embed code wherever you intend to put it. Then find the two places where the source URL is. These two links come after "value" and "src" and simply contain the link to the video. Now, paste " &start=__" onto the end of that URL, placing the number of seconds you want it to start at where the underscore is. Since there's no minutes section like you get with the link trick above, you have to do the math and add an additional 60 seconds for each minute you want to go in.

Creating and embedding a self-playing playlist
Say you've got two or more videos you want to share--or just group together. Skip the link dump and make a playlist. Go into your uploaded videos and create a new one. Then simply check off the videos you want to add. Pick the "add to playlist" option, then click on the playlist you just created.

For one reason or another, YouTube isn't very up front about giving you an embed code to stick the playlist elsewhere. Don't worry though--it's still there. To find it, go to the playlist you just made from here: www.youtube.com/my_playlists. Then click on the "play all" link on a playlist to start playing it. Under the playlist option on the right, click on the link with the name of the playlist you're watching. This will take you to a page that gives you a rundown of the entire playlist, along with the option to send that self-playing list as a permalink, and the embed code to put it elsewhere.

You're looking for these three things (the highlighted link will have the name of your playlist, not mine):
(Credit: CNET Networks)

Third-party sharing tools:
Worth a mention here is Splicd, which lets you pick specific beginning and end points of a video. It plays these videos off YouTube's site, but gives you simple sharing links and a slightly higher degree of control than YouTube does.

See also the aforementioned Quietube and Theeter which both provide links that can be shared with others that format the video without the rest of YouTube's UI.

Google's plans for Android's YouTube

As part of a series of blog posts, Google has released more information this week about some of the goodies we can expect out of version 1.5 of the Android operating system, which has been going by the code name Cupcake, and which wireless carrier T-Mobile is expected to push out to U.S. customers at the end of next week. High on the list of upgrades is the ability to record you-tube videos and upload them to Google-owned YouTube. Based on what we can ascertain from Google's introductory video, shooting a video on the Android 1.5 platform will be nearly as straightforward as taking a photo--except that after framing the picture, you'll need to turn the recorder on and off. After taking the video, you'll be able to share it via e-mail or MMS, or as a YouTube upload. We also learned more about what's in store in Android 1.5. Following the phone-to-Web upload theme, G1 owners will be able to more easily push photos from the Android device to Google's Picasa Web Albums online. In much the same way you'll upload videos to uTube, shooting photos to Picasa will be an option you encounter after taking a photo and pressing Share.