I saw the other day that YouTube now will start to allow "private" videos which means videos which are unlisted in the search result.
Now - this seems like a good idea, but I foresee two major problems with it.

1) How will this work with copyrighted material.
Google have gotten a lot of flak from copyright holders since they bought YouTube and many clips are pulled from YouTube due to infringement.
How will these companies who like to complain about copyrighted material handle the new unlisted service? If the movies are unlisted, how will companies be able to uphold the copyright?

One could imagine that perhaps the movies aren't as unlisted as claimed and certain individuals are allowed to search through them for material - or one could imagine that these companies aren't allowed to search them and the clips then will be a haven for copyrighted material.
Which is more likely? Well - given Google's behavior lately, I'd say scenario one is most likely.

2)  People have a strange tendency to share .... let's say rather private material online, thinking nobody but them in the world ever uses that strange thing called the internet.
My guess is that many people will use these unlisted postings for private - perhaps even rather much private - material and be very surprised that it finds itself publically all of the sudden.
Because you see - the privacy is just it is unlisted. If you have the URL you can still view it. That means you can basically just make a crawler and wade through content if the URLs follow a naming logic.
Given the lawsuit happy country - that might result in "funny" situations.

Well - time will tell.

Update: I've just noticed a "put porn on YouTube part 2" campaign. The jist of it is that people will swam YouTube with porn. This is now made much easier with these unlisted "private" services as people can upload their movies now, make them unlisted, to avoid getting them flagged too soon.
And then when the go-word is given, they can make all the clips public and listed and presto - YouTube can/will be full of pornography.

Some days ago a YouTube video appeared of a Danish women looking for the father of her child - which she supposedly met some evening and didn’t remember the name or nationality of.
The video can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8Seo5j_mNU
Now, many people thought it was real and it sort of vent “viral” which can be seen in the comments.

It has now been revealed that the video is a fake (oh the horrors - welcome to the Internet)  and is an advertisement from a Danish ad agency to promote “Denmark”, called “VisitDenmark“.
Well - that’s that to begin with, and I didn’t really care …. until I saw a representative for the agency in the news on a Danish TV station talking about he trick, which prompted my reaction.

The representative, sad there and kept repeating a memorized mantra that it was to promote awareness of the place called Denmark (duh)  and when asked if they had thought of the consequences and image they’d project of the Danish women, she repeated another memorized line of keywords - that they believed it promoted an image of “independent” women, taking “choices” in a “society” which allows them to take their own choice…….and other such keywords.
If I were a specialist in body language however, I’d also say she was lying about that - as she spoke those memorized keywords with erratic movements of upper body and head, and the attempts at emphasizing the keywords compared to the rest of the words, but I’m not a specialist - so..... It just looked like it wasn’t a reaction they had anticipated and needed to come up with excuses fast.

Funny though - my, and many others, impression of the messaged conveyed, was instead that they promoted Danish women as easy, willing to sleep with random tourists without knowing their names or nationality.
Visit Demark and try our easy women…. That’s the message they convey in my opinion.
The general reaction so far from people and politicians alike are also that it is distasteful attempt of promoting Denmark, and many remarks on both YouTube and elsewhere are the same interpretation as mine.

I guess we’ll see if this plan creates publicity and works or not…. Because I’m not a subscriber of the “any publicity is good publicity” theory - many people deliberate avoid products when displayed in stupid adverts or when companies lies to the public. This is no difference whether it is milk bought in the supermarket or awareness of a nation.

I can’t wait to see the consequences for VisitDenmark - because I’m sure we’ll see some and this case isn’t over yet.

Edit: I've added a new link because it seems the original one was pulled. Long live the internet. :)

Seems Google is thinking about placing advertisements on YouTube in an attempt to get it to make a profit. http://news.ebrandz.com/content/view/1897/568/

Well, personally I do not mind such advertisements myself, as long as they do not come in the form of "roll over", pop up or other such annoyances, and especially not if they starts containing sound and music.

What strikes me most though, is that YouTube isn't making Google much money (nooo, really, a free service isn't turning a large profit), which fits nicely into my Web 2.0 piece I wrote the other day. t looks to me very much like people (companies) just though that money would flow in, if you "Web 2.0"-ified your websites, whereas even a company as Google decides to start using ads on their Web 2.0 sites. And this is on top of the copyright problems associated with a service such as YouTube which I bet is also a large cost.

Now I'm sure Google doesn't need the money, but it all comes back to my point - Web 2.0 is not a silver bullet. Revenue is not guarenteed, and it is not a new economy (like the internet bubble buzz back in the mid 90s). It still needs to provide a product - adverts now - to be able to turn revenue.

It will be interesting to see how far Google will go with their advertisement, cause if they go a overboard (I doubt it, but well, I guess it is possible), the "customers" will simply move towards the next service which provides something comparable. A number of them already exists.  

Browsing my site in firefox I noticed a "read i.ytimg.com" in the status bar after the page had loaded in.

Being paranoid, I started scanning the page for links to "i.ytimg.com" to figure out if something was located in the source, but nothing. Then I checked the domain ytimg.com in dns stuffs domain finder and it pointed back to Google and YouTube. Having a number of YouTube videos embedded into some of my posts, I felt more at ease with this mysterious domain and message.

Then I did an ordinary search on the domain, and behold - apparently (many) others have had the same worries/experiences as me.  

So apparently ytimg.com is used by Google for their YouTube service. Phew.