When Google and YouTube announced the big buyout recently, many people were upset that they would not be getting a share of the U$1.65 billion. After all, it was users’ videos which made the site so huge. Are you still looking to get a little bit of cash from your video content? If so, then you should check out Metacafe.

Since you can now create your own animated GIFs, maybe you’ll also want to create custom Flash banners or multimedia presentations, right? Why not give Toufee a try. Toufee allows you to create movies, banners, e-cards, and presentations with an intuitive point and click editor powered by Flash. You can even import images from Flickr or videos from YouTube if you wish and the final product is no more than a few hundred Kb of data so even users on a dialup connection can take advantage of what you’ve created. Want to add speech to your presentation? No problem! Toufee has a built-in text-to-speech engine so you don’t have to waste time uploading audio. When you’re done, you’ll receive a link which you can use to share your work with a friend via e-mail, or you can get code to embed it onto your blog or MySpace page.

Vox is a brand new blogging service from the good folks at SixApart, well known for other blogging products such as the bloggin community LiveJournal, and the blogging platforms MovableType, and TypePad. Vox makes blogging simple and fun, and is in many respects similar to a MySpace page (minus the horrendous coding). Sign up for a free account, and select one of 150 different themes for your blog. Next, you can set various privacy settings so you’re in complete control over who can view your blog posts and pictures. With all that set up, you’ll want to have your friends and family join Vox, or you can become part of one of many neighborhoods and make new friends. The key part here being the last, and with so many social sites of these sort popping up I wonder how successful Vox will be. Still, Vox is beautiful and is a great alternative to other bloated services of it’s kind.

By now, many of you have probably learned how to use Google’s advanced search features, and some of you may even be able to create custom search strings to find any kind of data you want. If you’re not sure what I mean about custom search strings, then you can check out this blog post which explains it pretty effectively. While you could use these custom search strings to find a particular file, you may not want to type them out in a search box or even bother remembering how to create them. No problem! Why not use Briefli? Briefli lets you create custom search strings visually by entering a search term, and then selecting a file type and file extension. Briefli will then query Google and you’ll be able to reach the deepest bowels of the Internet to find whatever your heart desires.

As more people buy mobile phones with video recording capabilities, and more site begin supporting video sharing, there is an increasing need for an application which makes posting video from your phone to your website extremely easy. YouTube does support such a feature but it can be a little cumbersome to use. Enter Veeker.

Since last I posted on this site, much has happened, and one of the biggest events of the past few months was Google’s purchase of YouTube for U$1.65 billion (holy cow!). Over the past week or so, YouTube has done a bit of updating to its by color coding certain menus, moving filters, and adding some important site functions to the footer of the site for easier access. More importantly, the site has added advance statistics to track videos, as well as trackback links showing all sites which link to particular videos. Not like I need to tell any of you, but if you haven’t already, check out the vast amounts of content on that site.

Maybe you’re on the road a lot, or you’re bored at work and you’d like to watch some videos, but have no access to a computer. What do you do? You could always flip open your mobile phone and try to search for some videos online, but some sites don’t support phone browsers, or are too cumbersome to browse from a phone. Fortunately, there’s a cool new web app which lets you search through Google Video. Simply type http://srobbin.com/mobilevideo into your phone’s browser, and search away. There are a couple of catches though. You do need to have an unlimited data plan (unless you want to pay the huge bill), your phone’s browser must support XHTML (try Opera Mini, FREE), your phone must have enough storage to download the videos, and your phone must be able to play AVI or MP4 videos. If all these apply to you, you’re in for a nice and easy experience.

I have been a Linux promoter for a few years now (a very interesting story for another day), and am currently running Ubuntu on my laptop. One idea I’ve been toying with for the past several weeks is of building my own media center PC powered by Ubuntu, but lack of time has kept me from researching how to go about doing it. That is, until I came upon the MythTV Ubuntu Installation Guide.