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Although a majority of folks might still rely on traditional means such as the radio to discover new music, the competition is constantly heating up in the online music discovery realm, with services like Pandora, The Hype Machine and Last.fm always looking to recommend that next song or artist.

Today, YouTube is getting into the music recommendation and discovery game with an update to its music page.

Google just announced a new grant program that will distribute $5 million to "new and emerging YouTube partners. According to Google, the YouTube Partner Grants program is designed to find the best new ideas and production models from YouTube's content partners. As Google notes, many successful YouTube partners are able to generate substantial revenues, but they still lack the resources of studio-backed production houses.

Today YouTube has announced the launch of LeanBack, a TV-like viewing experience.

Go to LeanBack and a full-screen feed, personalized for each viewer, begins playing. Using your enter and direction keys you can navigate the feed. No need for the mouse or for entering URLs.

YouTube just announced a new version of its mobile site and it's getting a fair amount of attention. But if you're an iPhone user, is it really any better than the Apple-built native YouTube app?

The answer to that question depends on how important video quality is to you. If you're like me and tend to play YouTube videos with your phone in your pocket, listening to the audio while you walk your dogs (named Camas and Sammy - ok, so you don't have to be exactly like me) then the native iPhone app is probably just as good if not better still.

One of the most impressive benefits of the real-time Web is its ability to allow people to instantly collaborate on massive global projects from the comfort of their own home. Between editing articles on Wikipedia and helping rescuers locate evidence of a downed aircraft in dense woodland areas, there is no shortage of ways to collaborate on the Web. It is in this spirit of crowdsourcing that YouTube is launching a new project, "Life in a Day," which it hopes will tell the story of a single day on Earth.

When we announced the launch of Hulu Plus earlier this week, one of the comments we received touched on an issue that many overlook when considering online video. While others argued dollars and cents, one lone commenter pondered whether Hulu would be providing captions on its videos. YouTube, the largest provider of online video content, already provides automatic captioning services, but these are far from perfect. On Wednesday, however, YouTube announced that it has partnered with the Described and Captioned Media Program (DCMP) to certify "YouTube Ready" captioning services.

Ever since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the subsequent and ongoing spilling of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the public has been asking many questions. Who is to blame? How long will it take to stop the leak? How much irrevocable damage has been done? Thankfully, YouTube may be the best platform to get answers to these questions straight from the horse's mouth.

Numbers released from comScore today show that U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos online in the month of May, up from just over 30 billion in April. Hulu served up nearly 1.2 billion videos last month, nearly 3.5% of the overall market, while Google remained supreme, accounting for 43% of the market - a whopping 14.6 billion videos - with its powerhouse property, YouTube. Still, Hulu, a place where many watch full episodes of network television, is slowly inching from the pack, and Fox Interactive Media, sitting near the bottom of comScore's rankings, wants a piece of the action. They're target? Mobile.

May 2010 was a great month for YouTube. Not only did users of Google's online video service stream more videos per month in the U.S. than ever before (14.6 billion), but according to online analytics firm comScore, every single YouTube user now watches more than 100 videos per month. In total, Google's video properties now command slightly more than 43% of the online video market. No other online video service currently owns more than 3.5% of the streaming video market. In total, about 183 million Internet users in the U.S. watched online video last month.