Instead of having to go into your account and to the page specifically for annotations editing, the new editor is built right into the videos main page. While your viewers will see your video as normal, you’ll see yours with two little arrows in the bottom left corner, and when you hover your mouse over the video content, you’ll see that it changes into a little targeting icon. Pretty nifty!

There is also an option to turn the new annotations editor off, if it bugs you.

Just thought this was worth mentioning, especially since it seems like I’ve only been posting negative stuff around here lately. This is good news!

Oh, I almost forgot. Another YouTube change! For those of you who like to troll comment boards and then later regret your ridiculous comments, you’ll be glad to know that YouTube has made it now possible to delete your own comments. Previously, only the owner of the video was allowed to delete any comments.

While technically I am bound by the YouTube Partner agreement to not discuss the details, I can give you some clues that may help you to come to a conclusion on your own.

The buzz surrounding this issue was first really created when young hip-hop star Soulja Boy decided to make the following announcement in the form of a vlog:

Censorship!
YouTube recently announced on their blog that they are going to start tweaking the system in a way that will in essence censor videos that they deem “inappropriate” by demoting them “algorithmically”. Basically, they say they’re going to step up their game to prevent certain types of videos from getting mass exposure.

Obviously, this announcement has been met with harsh criticism. One of the greatest things about YouTube is how it is an open platform where people can share their content (no matter how off-color) with the world, without being censored by awful organizations like the FCC.

Even if this sounds like a good idea to some in theory, I have serious doubts that YouTube is concerned with making YouTube more family-friendly. Just a couple days after the announcement, the #1 most viewed video was titled “Jizz in my Pants”. If you haven’t already seen the video, check it out:

Don’t get me wrong, personally I find the video to be quite hilarious. But isn’t this a bit hypocritical? One would think so…

Spam!
I recently updated the settings on this site so that blog comments no longer contain the “no-follow” attribute. A lot of bloggers seem to be hopping on this bandwagon, in the spirit of rewarding their readers with a do-followed comment back to their URL (if a URL is included).

I don’t plan on changing this, HOWEVER…sweet Lord you have no idea how much spam the site is getting. If you are a spammer, please be advised that all comments are still strictly moderated. Not a single spam comment will ever make it onto a page of this site.

I know, I know, it’s not like spammers actually read the content and they’re going to do as they please anyway. So be it. I just had to get that off my chest!

Before I go back to playing Guitar Hero (which I’ve gotten exceptional at, thanks to Guitar Hero News, Media and Guides), I thought I’d share my frustration with you folks.

In response to users who have apparently made YouTube self-conscious by claiming that the quality of their videos left something to be desired, the kings of online video decided to introduce a new player with widescreen support.

Trouble is, nearly every video (with exception to those uploaded in the last few days) are not in widescreen format. The result is a bunch of videos floating in the center of a 960 pixel wide player. This is also another problem for those of us that use annotations in several videos.

And if you feel like evolving along with YouTube and want to actually upload widescreen videos, you’ll need to know how to render it as such. If you’re not very familiar with your video editing software, this may not be an easy task. For those of you that use Sony Vegas, I’ll show you how I went about successfully optimizing a video to be compatible with YouTube’s new widescreen format. Please keep in mind that I am by no means an authority on the software, and I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to go about this, but I’d just like to share what worked for me! The following was done in and should work with Vegas Professional 8.0 (may work with other versions as well):

• Change resolution in project properties to something big. I used the HDV 720-30p (1280×720 29.970 fps) preset.
• Go to “Render as” and choose Windows Media Video V9 (.wmv) from the pulldown menu.
• Choose “default template” from the template pulldown menu, and then click “custom”.
• Change video rendering quality to “best”.
• Click the “video” tab at the bottom. For image size, choose “custom”.  Enter a width of 864 and a height of 486. You may want to adjust the slider to 100% quality (but keep in mind it will inflate the file size of your video).
• OPTIONAL: Click the audio tab and change the bitrate to something a tad better. I use at least 128kbps (YouTube will heavily compress your audio, so don’t expect a huge difference).

Hopefully, at some point YouTube will make the widescreen player optional. But for now, it looks like we’re going to have to roll with it. If you check out YouTube’s official blog about the new widescreen here, you can see that the majority of user comments are negative (very negative, in many cases).

While I think it’s a great idea to offer that extra functionality, I think it’s a terrible idea to make every video page load a big widescreen player by default, regardless of whether or not the video is in that format. But I’ve got full faith and confidence in the people over at YouTube, and I’m sure they’ll work it out soon enough.

In a previous post, I went into detail about how you can use annotations to significantly boost the CTR (click-through rate) of your videos. Your #1 priority should be getting people to your videos, but your #2 priority is to get them to click to your site!

Now, the trouble here is that YouTube decided to place a little advertisement above (what appears to be) every single non-content partner video on YouTube. So, this applies to the general public and most likely every single YouTube marketer.

For those of us that had hundreds of videos up with annotations pointing perfectly at the URL in the description, this is bad news. Now all of our convenient little annotations point at the completely wrong place. I will show you an example:

If you’ve attempted to upload a video with someone elses content on it lately (and if you’re an avid reader of this blog, I’m sure you have!), you may have noticed that YouTube has become very sophisticated and efficient in their process of detecting content that is owned by a 3rd party. In some cases, the content is deleted virtually immediately. However, some companies have realized the potential that the free distribution of their content holds, and have decided to allow it…to an extent.

Basically, YouTube is now giving an option to users to who have uploaded content owned by one of these reasonable media giants. Instead of having their video removed, it can remain, under the condition that YouTube reserves the right to collect and deliver specific stats about your video’s performance to the copyright owner, as well as display ads on/in your video (and not share any of the revenue with you). MySpace is now planning on taking the same route, according to the article.

This is a good thing for you dilligent video marketers. Especially those of you that are constantly uploading music videos and promoting your ringtone sites/offers. Ringtone promotion on YouTube is right up there in profitability with dating, so if you haven’t already tried it, maybe it’s time you gave it a shot.

Universal Music is another of the progressive-minded companies that is on board with this new system, so their artists/videos might be of interest to you, if you’re looking to get into ringtone promotion.

In a day and age where “illegal” sharing of audio/video content is a simple, routine fact of life for so many people, it’s nice to see the big companies finally being more objective about the situation and finding new ways to work things out and find more realistic solutions. Although, it certainly took them long enough…

However, as of recently, autoplay views from external websites no longer count towards a video’s total view count. It appears the good folks at YouTube finally wised up to the method and put a stop to it.

To the best of my knowledge, user-initiated views from externally embedded videos (without autoplay) are still counted, but I’m not positive that each and ever view is counted. It can be difficult to gather accurate information because of the sluggish way YouTube video views update (I’ve seen view count freezes as long as 72 hours).

If you’re not already familiar with how to view what sites have your content embedded, simply go to your video’s page, and click the “Statistics & Data” tab (next to the “Commentary” tab). The top 5 linking sites will be shown beneath any honors the video might currently hold. Some video owners choose to disable the viewing of linking sites (a feature that was popular when the method of autoplaying embedded videos was still effective).