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YouTube announced today an interesting addition to its Insights analytics dashboard. Called "Hot Spots," the feature displays the "bounce rate" of viewers in any publisher's video on a second-by-second scale. Wondering if that joke you told went over well or not? YouTube will now tell you if a substantial number of viewers clicked away from your content at the moment your wisecrack went live.

The Insights analytics tool launched in May and offers free demographic data about viewers. We'd love to see these two features combined. Worried something you said might come across as sexist? If a whole lot of women stopped watching right after you said it - there might be some truth to that! (Who are we kidding? This is YouTube we're talking about.)

Partner Program not working out? NewTeeVee reports that YouTube will begin allowing content creators to sell their own ads, with the Google-owned video property taking a cut. The YouTube Partner Program, which gives top producers on the site a slice of ad revenue, opened to all last December. Now, at least one major content creator -- Revision3 -- is already handling some of their own ad inventory on YouTube, according to Advertising Age, and the plan is apparently to extend that option to other top producers.

The theme for this week must be the erosion of market share for dominant technologies. Earlier, we reported on the Firefox web browser's steady march into Internet Explorer territory, and today NewTeeVee points to a recent study from Ipsos MediaCT that shows the PC continuing to encroach on the television's dominating position for eyeball time when it comes to video watching. Where are you watching video? Vote in our poll below.

When I was a kid, I made dumb videos that a total of 5 people actually watched -- me and the 4 other kids I made them with. But today, a kid with a funny video can be seen by millions of people, whether he is swinging a golf ball retriever or lip syncing to a German pop song. There is an Internet shooting star falling to earth every day. Someone creates a video that goes viral and generates millions of views, and for some this flashes and fades, but others are parlaying these flashes into commercial success.

Last July's Democratic CNN-YouTube debate was mostly well received (though November's Republican follow up was met with less critical acclaim). This fall, Google and YouTube hope to replicate that success with a third presidential debate to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana. The "Presidential Forum" is sponsored by Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal and Democratic New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and will take place September 18, 2008. No media partner has been announced.

Queen Rania of Jordan, the current queen consort of King Abdullah II, has launched a YouTube channel on which she intends to break down Western stereotypes about the Arab world. The Queen, who has been an outspoken advocate of women's rights and education reform in the Arab world, hopes to use the channel to facilitate a conversation with people in the West to dispel negative stereotypes about the Arabs and Muslims that have become especially prevalent over the past several years.

Google announced this evening the immediate availability of a new video statistics package free for anyone with a YouTube account. The software, called Insight, gives users access to a range of statistics about the videos they upload to the site, such as where viewers are from, how often viewers in specific geographic regions viewed a video, or how long it took a video to become popular.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen has confirmed that the service will use Google's vast resources to launch live streaming functionality this year, according to a video interview on Sarah Meyer's new show Pop17. (Placemarked interview embedded below.)

This appears to be the first confirmation of such plans. YouTube live is probably going to be very big.

Like everyone else YouTube has an end of the year list, but there's something a little strange about all the media coverage today on the "top YouTube videos of 2007." These aren't the most viewed videos of the year. They are YouTube's selection of the "most memorable."

The most popular videos on YouTube this year were a bunch of major label music videos - not the user generated content the site would like to be known for. Ultimately there's plenty of room for both, but let's get our story straight.

YouTube has come to define the new era of online video, so let's take a look at their most popular videos of all time.

I was expecting something like lonelygirl15 or the original menthos coke video to be number 1. But no, the most popular video of all time on YouTube, so far, has been Evolution of Dance by comedian Judson Laipply. It was added to YouTube on April 06, 2006 and has since gone on to attract 55.8 Million views. It's had 60,476 comments, the first of which was: "That was freaking AWESOME! Thanks for sharing!!". The comments for this video are still going strong today - the latest 10 comments have all come in the last 30 minutes, as of writing. Plus it's been favorited 252,082 times (making it the number 1 Top Favorited video of All Time).

UPDATE: Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time, 2010 Edition