YouTube has given video awards to 12 videos. The categories are Adorable, Comedy, Commentary, Creative, Eyewitness, Inspirational, Instructional, Music, Politics, Series, Short Film, and Sports. The winners get bragging rights, a trophy and an invitation to an event later this year, presumably an awards ceremony.

Which one do you like best?

And the winners are:

Adorable: Laughing Baby

Comedy: Potter Puppet Pals in “The Mysterious Ticking Noise”

Commentary: LonelyGirl15 is Dead!

Creative: The Original Human TETRIS Performance by Guillaume Reymond

Eyewitness: Battle at Kruger

Inspirational: Blind Painter

Instructional: How to solve a Rubik’s Cube (Part One)

Music: “Chocolate Rain” Original Song by Tay Zonday

Politics: Stop the Clash of Civilizations

Series: The Guild - Episode 1: Wake-Up Call

Short Film: my name is lisa

Sports: balloon bowl

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Video Awards, Online Video

YouTube announced the launch of YouTube Everywhere. This opens up YouTube services and functionality to be used on every website or application that wants to integrate with YouTube and use its services. You can set it up so that your users can upload videos to YouTube and never leave your site. You can retrieve your user’s videos and play them on your site, with a player that you get to brand. You can add/edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc).

This move means that anyone can build a YouTube like capability into their website or application and take advantage of YouTube’s full capabilities and you can do it for free. This is an amazing tool kit that will allow people to build all kinds of interesting applications. All of this will be great to see.

There are also a number of other big implications:

• It increases rate at which GooTube will become the central repository for video content on the web.
• Google will become the largest content delivery network we’ve ever seen. This is bad news for the other players in video distribution business, such as Britecove or Maven Networks.
• And it could be bad news for players such as Akamai, if Google gets way ahead and opens up its content delivery network further.
• GooTube will collect enormous amounts of data about what’s happening with video everywhere on the net and that will be really valuable to advertisers.
• Everything everywhere will speed up a lot, and that means publishers and developers better figure out how they compete in that world.
• Flash/Adobe just increased in value as this will increase the dominance of Flash even further.

Here’s the video version of the release:

Leave a comment with other implications or applications you would like to see people build with this.

You can find more discussion at Techmeme.

Click here follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/alexnesbitt

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google, online video

Kina Grannis, an aspiring singer songwriter, caught my attention along with a lot of the tech community with a post over at Digg. The post linked to Kina’s YouTube page and had a song called “Gotta Digg”. The Digg fans went crazy for Kina and voted over 10,000 times for collection of posts linking to her blog and to the video at YouTube. Kina’s YouTube traffic skyrocketed up and “Gotta Digg” has gone over 180,000 views.

Kina is trying to win a contest and NEEDS YOUR VOTE. The contest is called Crash the Superbowl and the winner gets a recording contract and their video played on the Super Bowl broadcast. Kina was kind enough to spend some time with me on the phone discussing her career, the contest and the impact of her most recent experience with social media.

 

 Digital Podcast 28 [9:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1507)

If you want to hear more of Kina’s music you can visit her YouTube page, KinaGrannis.com or sign up for voting reminders at a site she set up for video blogging about the contest called Two Weeks for Kina.

Kina also has some CDs for sale on iTunes including One More in the Attic, sincerely, me and In Memory of the Singing Bridge

Gotta Digg Video

The Myspace Video

So GO VOTE FOR KINA.

Technorati Tags: Crash the Super Bowl, Kina Grannis, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, social media, social media marketing

The British Monarchy have created a channel on YouTube. Queen Elizabeth ll’s Christmas day video will now be available on YouTube at the Royal Channel. It will be interesting to see how long it takes other world leaders to realize that they have a direct channel to the people via the internet. Who needs CNN when you can have your own channel.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Queen Elizabeth, Royal Channel, online video