Of course, there are thousands of commercial videos on YouTube where producers did not ask for written consent from the company before posting these videos, and, according to Mediaweek, YouTube has only contacted a very small number of these though the service is clearly trying to signal that it is not happy with the current situation. While YouTube is only notifying a small number of content owners, some producers complain that YouTube will not promote their videos if they include product placements.

YouTube, which dominates the online video market, is one of the most important outlets for most content producers, and YouTube has every interest in keeping its most prolific talent on the service. At the same time, though, YouTube is also bleeding a good amount of money every single day.

According to Mediaweek, YouTube will soon announce a more formal process for integrating commercial videos that integrates their own ads and product placements.

Space Lab will allow students to submit a science experiment by video, and a panel of scientists and astronauts, including Professor Stephen Hawking, will pick the best submissions. The winners' experiments will be performed aboard the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the whole world.

As if getting your own science experiment performed live on the ISS for the entire world wasn't enough, there are also prizes like zero-G flights, Lenovo IdeaPad laptops, a trip to Japan to watch your experiment launched into space, or a cosmonaut training experience in Star City, Russia.

Space Lab is part of YouTube's educational channels available at YouTube.com/EDU. Teachers can visit YouTube.com/Teachers to learn how to incorporate Space Lab into their classrooms.

Read more on the official YouTube blog.

Network administrators can turn on YouTube for Schools to give school computers access to the vast library of YouTube EDU content from partners such as the Smithsonian and TED. The content is organized into topical and grade-level playlists. You can view the lists at youtube.com/teachers.

YouTube for Schools allows unfettered access to educational videos without any of the YouTube stuff that's inappropriate for school. Schools can customize their YouTube portals with playlists and topics tailored to their curricula. And teachers can find videos arranged by topic and grade level to help them formulate lesson plans.

In 2010, Google's launch of encrypted search ran afoul of school network administrators by clashing with the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal law that would have required schools to block Google. Google had to move encrypted search to a new, separate domain to fix the problem. With this specialized version of YouTube, it looks like Google has figured out how to better serve the needs of schools.

YouTube has run some interesting educational promotions this year, such as a contest to perform your science experiment live from space.

Read more about YouTube for Schools on the YouTube blog.

Do you think YouTube is a good educational resource?

In the meantime, YouTube now also offers a new 'automatic caption timing' feature for all new uploads that makes it easier to add captions manually. You simply upload a text file with a transcript of the video and Google's speech recognition technology will figure out when those words are spoken and create captions based on this information.

YouTube's speech recognition technology is based on the same speech-to-text algorithms that transcribe voicemails in Google Voice. You can also translate these captions into 51 languages.

As expected, these captions aren't always perfect, but work surprisingly well on the videos that we have seen so far.

If you want to have a look at how these captions work, have a look at one of the videos in the UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and Google & YouTube channels.

While the YouTube Video Editor is certainly nothing to compete with the likes of Final Cut Pro or Premiere, it has the basic functionality needed to finally make it possible for those living the ultra-mobile, ultra-lightweight lifestyle to put their videos online without having to leave all the unwieldy odds and ends.

The editor is simple and intuitive, with a drag-and-drop interface showing a full thumbnail inventory of all of your videos. Editing a video consists of setting a starting and stopping point for each clip, so if you want to select multiple clips from the same video, you simply drag that video to the bar below and repeat the process for each clip. In much the same way, different videos, or clips from those videos, can be spliced together.

Of course, rough editing like this can leave some interesting audio, so YouTube also provides you with audio tracks to overlay over the entire video from its AudioSwap library. Two caveats come with using the audio overlay - adding an audio track from the AudioSwap library will permanently erase the audio track on the mashed-up video and YouTube says that it may display advertisements on videos using these audio tracks.

We are not quite sure how, exactly, ESPN will bring its own player to YouTube and whether this means that ESPN will continue to host its content and ads on its own servers. We asked YouTube about the details of this arrangement and will update this post once/if we get an answer.

Google has generally shied away from doing pre-roll ads on YouTube and argued that they did not perform well on the service, but given the current economic climate and the pressure on YouTube to actually make a profit at some point, it would seem that Disney and ESPN were able to convince YouTube to give pre-roll ads a try.

For the time being, these ads are only available in the U.S. and in English, though Google plans to launch them in other regions and languages as well.

Google has obviously struggled to turn YouTube into a profitable business unit. Taking YouTube ads out of the YouTube silo could help Google to win over more advertisers and give current advertisers more reasons to buy ads on YouTube.

It might be surprising to see Facebook integration so prominently on YouTube, with Google+ is trying to make a name for itself, but think of it this way: Facebook is huge. YouTube is huge. Google+ is not yet huge. What better way for Google to introduce Facebook users to Google+?

The new YouTube got a lot of design attention. No more simple boxes on a white background. Google wants lots of eyeballs on these pages. It is realigning its media relationships and striking new content deals around the world. YouTube has been mainstream for years, but the new YouTube will redefine the term "mainstream media." Disney movies, music videos, Rebecca Black and cute puppies all make YouTube what it is, and the new design encourages users to watch and share all of it.

Read more about the redesign on the YouTube blog.

YouTube goes out of its way to state that this move has nothing to do with the record labels. Patrick Walker, YouTube's Director of Video Partnerships, Europe, Middle East and Africa, lays the full blame on PRS for Music - and PRS, of course, blames Google for being too greedy. Walker, however, also says that the negotiations continue, so we might just see a solution in the near future. For now, however, users will have to resort to illegally uploaded videos if they want to watch music videos on YouTube in the UK.

Next, our favorite new feature is the queuing from search capability, which allows you to add videos to your queue when you search from the video page. We know that when we go on a bender of Kids In The Hall clips, we don't want to wait too long between our head crushing and our "girl drink drunk". You can even search without stopping the video you're watching and if you don't know what to watch next, YouTube may just queue up some classics for you automatically.

Last comes an addition to a section of YouTube not exactly known for its intelligence - the comments. The comments section will now list both text and video, so that video updates become a bigger and more integrated part of the discussion. This seems like a natural and necessary progression, but if the videos are anything like the text, we can only imagine where this will end up.

For now, the new features are opt-in only and if you don't like what you find, you can just as easily opt out, although we'd suggest giving it a shot.

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.

Both lists are fun to watch - even if the mega-classic Shoes was somehow not included on either. (I mean, "these lists SUCK.") I suppose to be fair, Shoes was a 2006er - as was Dick in a Box, but do any of the videos below come close to the awesomeness of either of those videos?

Some video producers have found innovative ways of using YouTube's annotations feature, but often, they are only a distraction, and a lot of videos are simply better without them. Interestingly, YouTube acknowledged this in its announcement today and YouTube makes it pretty easy to turn annotations off altogether. Just go to your 'Account Settings' and look for the Annotations settings (obviously, you have to be logged in to YouTube for this to work).

While YouTube added Adsense recently, with embeds, comes a different form of advertising; you can now control annotations, look at captions, and even search for other videos directly, regardless on where they are posted.

How does it work?

Advertisements appear on the bottom 20 percent of the screen (see image below) and last for about ten seconds, apparently the time recommended for maximum engagement. You can see it in action on Lisa Nova Live.

Image: Monetized YouTube embeds on Lisa Nova site

An interesting function that they've included is the ability to scroll though advertisements, and while we're not quite sure who would want to do that advertisers seem keen: you can now click through directly to the advertisers site.

Google certainly seems to be making an effort to monetize YouTube; adding Adsense yesterday, monetized embeds today, you have to wonder what's coming tomorrow.

What do you think?

So what's this all about? It seems that, in the coming weeks, YouTube plans to launch a brand-new user interface for their Channels section and if you click the secret link, you can be a part of the group that helps test it and provide feedback.

Here's the message that displays:

The new Channels section lets you edit your Channel within your channel. Using buttons at the top of the screen, you can change "Settings," "Themes and Colors," and "Modules." Previously, this type of editing had to be done on a separate page. Also, an "edit" button appears within different sections of the page, letting you further customize those particular parts.

Here's what the current Channels section looks like:

Here's the new Channels beta:

YouTube has also set up a "secret" blog which they'll use to communicate with the beta testers. You can follow the blog here: http://youtube-channels-beta.blogspot.com. There, you can leave bug reports, requests, and other feedback in the comments section.

After watching quite a few of the performers, we know that (unlike with American Idol hopefuls), this crew really knows their stuff. Under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, all signs point to the concert being a treat. Plus, it is an unprecedented opportunity for talented musicians from all over the world to meet each other and their mentors - as well as being a resume highlight once it is complete.

Stay tuned for the grand finale, the Symphony Orchestra performance at Carnegie Hall. We are certain it will look (and sound) amazing when broadcast via YouTube HD.