ReadWriteWeb

Can you imagine a better way to promote your racing engine business than to take your Web site visitors, on a mind-bending video demo ride? For the last decade, Tom Nelson of Nelson Racing Engines (NRE), in Chatsworth California, has been building the nastiest, tire shredding, frame-twisting, internal combustion engines, on the planet. They had to get a bigger dynamometer because the old one only went up to 2000 horsepower!
How do I know it's true? I've watched most of his absolutely awesome videos on YouTube.

By now you know that using social media is an essential part of running any-sized business, but how do you take those first baby steps towards learning about various services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others? The mailing list provider Constant Contact has put together an excellent site called the Social Media Quickstarter here that is chock full of tutorials and step-by-step directions, along with blog entries on best practices, suggestions, a few podcasts, and other instructional materials.

As Web-based video becomes more prominent and more useful for businesses, the biggest issue is figuring out what resonates with your audience. You post a video and then what: how many people watch it all the way through? Should you have broken it up into shorter segments? Did you need additional details? Did people like the video and link back to it? Depending on the video site you use to share your content, you have a number of analytics and tracking tools at your disposal.

In a small but significant move this afternoon, Google's YouTube announced two new features that will make it all the more attractive to serious video publishers: HD preview images and the ability to remove the YouTube logo from the player.

Online video is growing fast and business publishers have a lot of choices for places to host their video. YouTube has scale like no one else - but it's not been quite as classy as some other options. The ability to remove the YouTube logo by simply adding ?modestbranding=1 after the URL in a player embed code is both generous and wise. All for free!

The video-sharing app ShowYou is continuing to roll out improvements to its platform, with couple of new features today including the ability to view it on more screens - thanks to a new browser version of the app.

The Web version is similar to the iPad and iPhone app. You can scroll through and view the videos that are in your social streams - shared by you and your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, YouTube network and so on.

Have you got an awesome technology that captures some of the potential of the new read/write Web? We want to see the most exciting projects you've got demonstrated live in New York City next month at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit at Columbia University June 13 and14.

Our past events have included a segment called Speed Geeking and the fast-paced but intimate format has been such a big hit with attendees that we're bringing it back for this event.

How does it work? Small groups, fast demos, rotate! It's a great way to see a lot of tech up close.

First, 3D came to the movie theater. Then companies like Samsung started to make 3D televisions to bring the experience home. Tablets and phones like the Motorola Xoom and some Android devices from LG took 3D mobile.

Now, YouTube, Firefox and Nvidia are trying to bring 3D to the Web. Firefox 4 is using HTML5 and WebM to bring thousands of 3D YouTube videos to the Web while wearing Nvidia 3D Vision Hardware. The Web has been lacking 3D because it is a fundamentally different platform than the others, which are either distribution channels or specific devices. It is worth it to go get some Nvidia glasses to cruise YouTube in 3D?

How big is YouTube? It's biiiiig - 3 billion views per day big. On this, YouTube's sixth birthday, the Google-owned video sharing service released a few impressive stats (via infographic, of course), detailing its impressive numbers. Today, users upload more than 48 hours - yes, two days worth! - of videos every minute. This represents a 37% increase in the number of uploads over the last six months and a 100% increase over last year.

Journalism museum, the Newseum, and Google have joined forces to launch the Journalists Memorial channel, described as "A Tribute to Journalists Who Have Died Pursuing the Truth."

For those of us who write about feature creep on beer apps from our bathtubs, journalism holds only the dual dangers of trolls and sponge-based injuries. For those who are out in the field, especially in dicey places, it holds the dangers of imprisonment, beatings and death. With the flare up of wars and now mass protests, 2011 has already seen 16 fatalities.

Buddy Media, the Facebook content management company we profiled earlier this year, announced that it will acquire social media sharing and analytics company Spinback.

And earlier this week Tap11 was acquired by AVOS, the new company from YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

These moves follow Salesforce.com's high profile acquisition of Radian6 in March.