YouTube has announced that they will be opening the editorial control of their homepage to one user for a few days each month. All you have to do to be considered is send them a list of 10 videos that you like and would want to be featured on the site’s homepage.

Being featured on YouTube’s homepage means 100,000s views for each video placed there, and can mean instant YouTube stardom.

It’s an exciting move by the company and an excellent way to respond to concerns that the site is being taken over by the interests of advertisers.

It is definitely an interesting first step, and one that has Marshall Kirkpatrick wondering if YouTube will ultimately go the Netscape route:

With all the Google money behind them, you have to wonder what it would look like if YouTube employed a NetScape 2.0 type strategy and paid a small crew of regular user/editors to dig up the best videos on the site and facilitate community around them.

Here’s the relevant portion of the announcement on YouTube:

We’re opening up the programming of our home page to guest editors. We’ll pick one user a month to take over for a few days. All you’ll have to do is send us 10 videos you’d like to place on home (make sure they adhere to the terms of service!) along with a short video about why you chose what you did and how you found the experience. If you’re interested in participating, please let me know.

Originally posted on January 12, 2007 @ 1:37 pm

As far as I know, this is the first ever YouTube festival. The festival, which takes place at the Tellus cinema on January 19 in Stockholm, Sweden, aims to be totally interactive. The idea is that people can tell Piratbion, which is behind the festival, about movies on YouTube, and they’ll possibly air them.

The legality of the festival is dubious though. Piratbion haven’t bothered to talk to YouTube about the festival, and is even known to air movies without permission. It will be interesting to see if YouTube will act upon this at all, or any copyright holders whose videos will air during the festival.

If you understand Swedish, check out the official site of the YouTube festival.

Originally posted on January 11, 2007 @ 11:00 am

You see those MyBlogLog widgets everywhere, which is probably why Yahoo! went on and bought the company. But they’re not all good, as SoloSEO points out by spamming TechCrunch through MyBlogLog as an experiment.

First I created a dummy MyBlogLog account. Then I opened Opera (the browser), which has a feature to set a page to refresh automatically for a period of time, like every 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, etc. After I logged in at MyBlogLog, I went to techcrunch.com and set the page refresh to 1 minute. After a few minutes of letting Opera do its refresh thing, I checked in FireFox (not logged into MyBlogLog) to verify I had the top spot. I did.

That’s a pretty cheap way getting on TechCrunch, right? Well, there’s also a script that will help you, as well as regular spammy MyBlogLog comments.

Yahoo will do what they can to stop this type of spam. In the meantime, please don’t abuse it, that’s evil.

Originally posted on January 11, 2007 @ 8:00 am

Apparently this has been rumored for some time now. StubHub is an online marketplace for the resale of event tickets, and eBay obviously wants a larger piece of the pie in that area as well.

“StubHub has been extremely successful in the online tickets segment, and it’s a perfect complement to eBay’s tickets business,” said Bill Cobb, president, eBay North America Marketplaces. “Together we can strengthen both businesses and provide fans with more choice and better service.”

“StubHub’s business model is an excellent fit with eBay, a company we’ve admired for a long time,” said Jeff Fluhr, founder and CEO of StubHub. “StubHub exists to serve passionate fans – and we feel great knowing our customers will benefit from the power of eBay and its community of users.”

The deal is scheduled to go through during the first quarter this year if all goes well with stockholders and so on. It probably does. More at GigaOM and TechCrunch as usual.

Originally posted on January 11, 2007 @ 6:00 am

Matt has announced new additions Ideas and Kvetch, two new ways to participate in the development of open source blogging platform WordPress.

The first is simply called Ideas, and it’s a place where you can share your wildest WordPress wishes with the world, and also vote on other people’s ideas. This allows people outside our normal circle of developers to have a direct say in what goes into the next version of WordPress. For 2.2, which comes out in late April, we will include the top voted on features, so propose something, tell your friends about it, and link it from your blog.

The second we’ve named after the Yiddish word, Kvetch. This is a place where you can quickly and anonymously express whatever might disagree with you in the WordPress world. Let it all loose, but try to keep it PG rated, and we’ll show a random kvetch on the page once we get enough in the system.

Originally posted on January 10, 2007 @ 4:33 am