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.

In an open video address to Prime Minister Vladmir Putin, Alexei Dymovsky says, "Maybe you don't know about us, about simple cops, who live and work and love their work. I'm ready to tell you everything. I'm not scared of my own death." How much does Dymovsky have to fear? The answer might surprise those of us who are accustomed to the relative freedoms of self-expression.

Dymovsky served in the Russian army from 1996 until 1998. After that, he worked as a district commissioner of the city police in the Amur region. In 2004, he was transferred to the city of Novorossiysk police department, where he eventually advanced to the post of senior security officer and oversaw crimes related to drug trafficking.

"We are working as hard as we can with all our souls," Dymovsky says. After referencing losing two wives, who refused to put up with his work, and problems with "relationships with the bosses," Dymovsky says, "I want to talk about it now." He speaks of being denied leave of absence or medical treatment for illness, about police taking bribes and about pervasive corruption. "I am not afraid," he says, "I am telling my name... But I cannot stand detecting the nonexistent crimes, imprisoning people who are not guilty. I can't stand it anymore."

Take a look at one of the videos Dymovsky has posted so far:

These videos bear significant political impact, but they also speak to the importance of the Internet in acting as our generation's soapbox. Any wronged person has an almost infinite capacity to express, persuade and convince. Currently, a source at the Russian Interior Ministry's internal security department has confirmed to at least one publication that representatives of several human rights organization actively support Dymovsky.

The officers mentioned in Dymovsky's reports have filed libel suits against him, and the Russian interior minister has said his office is investigating the former police officer's claims.

This means that those amazing, high-definition videos you uploaded last year will now finally be converted to their original resolutions and will finally look as good as they do on your desktop. The new resolution represents a significant improvement over the current 720p maximum resolution, which leaves all those glorious, pirated segments of old movies tragically blurred and pixelated.

Here's YouTube's example of a 360p image:

If you're not uploading videos from your phone, however, you're probably looking at something like YouTube's current HD setting, 720p:

And, by way of comparison, this is the new maximum resolution YouTube HD videos will have:

Those images are from YouTube. Why they chose a dog's muzzle, we may never know. But we're awfully grateful for the resolution improvements.

Also, users are specifically encouraged to upload videos that will showcase the capabilities of the new hotness that is 1080p resolution. YouTube engineer Billy Biggs tells users in the related blog post, "Be creative and choose subjects that really show off the beauty of your camera. We will run the best examples on our homepage in a future spotlight."

While it'll be nice to see our own classic jams restored to their original awesomeness, it will also be interesting to see professionally produced videos now appearing in better HD. Well done, YouTube, and thanks for allocating the resources.

5. United Break Guitars

• Uploaded on July 6, 2009

• 5,914,000 views

4. MTV VMA's Remix: Kanye West Interrupts Obama's Speech

• Uploaded on September 13, 2009

• 4,200,000 views

3. SOUR '日々の音色 (Hibi no neiro)

• Uploaded July 1, 2009

• 1,600,000 views

2. Evian Roller Babies International Version

• Uploaded: July 1, 2009

• 12,436,000 views

1. JK Wedding Entrance Dance

• Uploaded: July 19, 2009

• 31,000,000 views

Bloggers who embed YouTube links tend to be male and young. The most active group of YouTube users is between 25 and 35 years old. Bloggers who embed YouTube videos are mostly male (58%), and Break.com is the most male-dominated video site (885), while MTV attracts more female bloggers (68%).

The most active video embed users live in the US, followed by Brazil, Spain, the UK and Canada. In the US, most of these YouTube users live in California, followed by New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida. The size of these states account for a large chunk of these differences. Connecticut, Alabama and South Carolina come in last.

Taking all video-sharing networks into account, the most active bloggers can be found in New York City, followed by Sao Paulo, London, Madrid and Paris.

In Asia, more than 90% of bloggers are younger than 35. In North America, 28% of all bloggers who embed videos are older than 35.

Focus on YouTube

Unsurprisingly, YouTube is the most popular video service in the blogosphere. The site attracts 82% of all embeds and direct links from blogs, followed by Vimeo (8.8%), DailyMotion (4%) and MySpace (1.1%). YouTube's dominance in this market becomes even more apparent when compared to other popular sites like Hulu and MTV. Hulu accounts for only 0.5% of all blog embeds, and MTV is dead last on Sysomos' list with 0.1%.

In Asia, YouTube is even more dominant, accounting for 88.5% of all embeds; and in South America, YouTube leads with an 87.4% market share. Some of these differences can be explained by the fact that some of the services that Sysomos looked at are simply not available in these markets.

More Data

Sysomos' report offers a lot more demographic information than we could highlight in detail, but here are a few more nuggets of interesting information:

• The most popular day for embedding videos is Tuesday.
• The most popular time is between 11:00 am and noon EST.
• YouTube's most active demographic group (20-35) is three times larger than the second-most active group (35-65).
• 20% of bloggers who embed YouTube videos are teenagers; 2.4% are over 60.

User generated content communities tend to have a very particular culture. If and when they get bought out, all kinds of issues arise around cultural differences and control. Seldom is this as clear as when old logins at a site are no longer accepted and users are required to get an account with the big powerful company that bought the community.

Update: YouTube contacted us after publication to clarify that this change is only required of people who previously chose to associate an additional Google account with their existing YouTube account and have continued to sign in with their old YouTube username and password. Those users will now be able to use either their YouTube username or their Google username but will be required to use only their Google password to log in. This is the kind of thing that happens sometimes when companies have to merge associated accounts for a single service - but people who haven't tied a Google account to their YouTube account will see no change. We apologize for getting the story wrong.

Chris Messina caught a screenshot today of a logged-in page at YouTube with the message: "Please start signing in with your Google password from now on. Pretty soon we will be phasing out support for signing in with your old YouTube password." Pretty simple!

We'll see if that warning ahead of time is helpful in calming the likely outrage by some users. YouTube is roughly four and a half years old - and it's been a Google property for three of those years! Maybe Google just now decided to keep it.

Will this be an opportunity for users to vent about overbearing copyright controls on background music, the rapid growth of commercial content on the site or other ways things have changed from "the good old days?" Time will tell. Given the small number of users who can even remember the pre-Google days, this transition might not be such a big deal.

See Also: Is YouTube The Next Google?

While email clients can filter bot and spam messages, it's more difficult to discern between personal and general messages from real people. With Raindrop, users messages are categorized and prioritized. For example, in Twitter your direct messages and reply messages are highlighted while the rest of the stream is cast aside. Meanwhile, mailing list messages are also given their own category, separate from personal emails. As with most Mozilla products, the group will encourage front-end widgets and code from outside 3rd party developers.

While the tool certainly shows promise, it is currently only available to developers. The group's first priority is to build a downloadable installer. To ensure that you're one of the first non-developer testers, keep an eye on labs.mozilla.com/raindrop.

Raindrop UX Design and Demo from Mozilla Messaging on Vimeo.

Thanks to Arjo for the tip!