ReadWriteWeb

Dear Mr. David Girouard,

I decided to write you a quick note after reading your post about 2011 as the year there will be nothing but the Web. I am not so sure that is a great idea.

I'll give you a few reasons: WikiLeaks, Delicious and YouTube.

YouTube is in talks to acquire the sprawling web video production group Next New Networks, according to reporting this morning from tech reporter Claire Cain Miller and media reporter Brian Stetler at The New York Times. The deal would represent YouTube's first major move into the creation of its own original video programming.

Four years old next month, Next New Networks represents a wide variety of content producers, the most recently famous being the bizarre autotune remix Bed Intruder Song ("hide your kids, hide your wife"). As with any in-house Google content, questions would asked about the objectivity of the company's video search results if the deal goes through.

Over 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, so it's just not feasible that YouTube review each video before it's posted online. Instead, YouTube points to its community guidelines and lets its users flag those videos with inappropriate content for removal. And now, a new category will let you flag ones that "promote terrorism."

According to a study of over 16,000 mobile YouTube users conducted by Google, 75% of respondents said that mobile is their primary way of accessing YouTube. At first glance, that figure may come as no surprise - after all, how shocking is at that a survey of mobile users finds that they watch a lot of YouTube Mobile? However, it's actually a rather telling number.

For some of us, watching YouTube on a mobile device is an additional way to watch video, not the primary way. But as it turns out, for a large majority of mobile video users, it's completely the opposite.

YouTube will launch a new discovery tool called Topics tonight on its labs page TestTube, the company told reporters this morning. Topics will allow users to discover high-quality videos about topics of interest to them without requiring the user to enter detailed search queries.

"With Topics, YouTube will try to deliver results by honing in on comments from users on videos they have viewed, sites that have linked to the video and even what users have watched in the past," writes the BBC's Maggie Shiels this morning. A YouTube spokesperson confirmed for us by email that an official announcement will be made on the YouTube blog this evening.

YouTube crossed the 1 billion subscriptions mark today and if some of those aren't yours - you're missing out. Subscription to YouTube channels is a great way to make use of the service, especially on mobile devices.

Have you got some favorite YouTube subscriptions? I do, and I thought I'd share them here. If you've got some good ones to recommend to ReadWriteWeb readers let us know in comments so we can subscribe and watch them while exercising and folding laundry.

Google may be accused of helping kill the newspapers of the world, but the search and advertising giant announced today the dedication of $3 million in new funding to support innovative new media organizations outside the United States. That's on top of $2 million granted to the Knight Foundation. ($1m for the Knight News Challenge, $1m TBD.)

Google has been a consistent supporter of new media efforts. This new announcement means that for every $40,000 in the company's market cap, it is donating $1 for the future of media. That doesn't seem like the most aggressive initiative, given the gravity of the situation - but it is Google's money.

YellowBird, a Netherlands-based video technology startup, just had its interactive, 360-degree video player approved by YouTube for integration into YouTube's channels. With the new player, you can now not only watch immersive, 360-degree YouTube videos, you can also navigate the video by dragging your mouse. As TechCrunch rightly described it last year - it's like Google Street View for video.

The first YouTube video with this technology is live now, in a campaign designed for Doritos.

While Google's YouTube remains the most popular video sharing site in the U.S., Facebook is now the second most popular place to watch videos online. According to the latest data from comScore, Facebook just took the #2 spot from Yahoo and continues to grow rapidly. While Facebook.com served 166 million viewing sessions in July, this number was up to 243 million in August.

YouTube and the French music-rights collection agency SACEM just announced a deal that ensures that artists are compensated when their music is played on the French version of Google's popular video sharing site. According to SACEM, "the license covers the international repertoire managed by SACEM including in particular the Anglo-American repertoire of multinational publishers, as well as other works managed by SACEM present on the platform, from the launch of the service in France to 2012." In total, YouTube now has similar deals in eight countries.