But the grainy moving images of skateboarding tricks, spoof music videos and cats chasing laser pointers were quickly edged out of the way by premium content from competing online video providers. Netflix, Hulu and other media company-approved outlets started showcasing full-length movies and televisions series online — and that was a game changer.

YouTube is now taking steps to level the playing field once again and move its site to the center of the online video world. The changes were outlined in two rare blog posts from YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, posted just hours apart from one another on Monday, May 9. The posts detailed YouTube’s plans to “bring more of the video you love to YouTube.”

In one of the posts, Kamangar revealed YouTube’s strategy for introducing rental movies to its platform. Currently, YouTube offers hundreds of free movies and studio-approved trailers and clips from feature films.

But the new arrangement will offer more program options for rent at “industry standard pricing” – which is in the $2.99 per rental range. Feature movies are available at the http://www.youtube.com/movies channel, with new movies being added each week. Movie pages will feature exclusive YouTube extras as well as embedded Rotten Tomatoes reviews to enhance the viewer’s experience.

Major studios including NBC Universal, Lionsgate, Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers will provide 3,000 additional titles available for rent on YouTube. Some of the initial titles are “Goodfellas,” “Inception,” “Little Fockers,” “Despicable Me,” “The King’s Speech” and “Caddy Shack.”

Disney, Fox and Paramount declined to have their content included, mainly due to piracy concerns. In addition, Paramount’s parent company Viacom is currently in legal disputes with YouTube.

The new rental platform was tested out last year in a partnership with the Sundance Film Festival. First, viewers could rent Sundance Film festival entries and Sundance even premiered a full-length movie “A Day in the Life” on YouTube. The film was composed of scenes from a single day shot by YouTube viewers around the world.

Kalamanger made it clear that their new feature film additions won’t push aside their bread and butter — user-created content.

The other post focused on YouTube’s commitment to encouraging and fostering this type of content. YouTube partners, those who are featured content producers, number in the 20,000+ range. Individually, many of them are garnering audiences that rival major television shows.

Kamangar explained that YouTube will be investing heavily in supporting original content creation to keep these partners motivated and provide new content for viewers. Although the details were unclear as to how much would be invested, he pointed to two existing programs at the focus of the investment efforts.

• YouTube NextUp – This program focused on 25 promising YouTube creators selected from across the country. They were given a $35,000 advance each to further their YouTube careers. The recipients received a trip to New York City to attend the first-ever YouTube Creator Camp, and personalized training on their channel, brand and content development. Once their program was complete they were promoted globally across the platform.
• YouTube Creators Institute – YouTube partnered with the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and Columbia College Chicago’s Television Department to help 10 original content producers become more skilled in video production. The producers attended one of the two schools to study professional video production in an academic environment.

The producers from the first round of both programs are now being featured on YouTube. YouTube plans to build on this success by offering more resources for creators.

This is all in what seems to be a coordinated, all-out effort to make YouTube the premier destination for online video content of all types.

Of course, only time (and the Internet) will tell.

The company is expanding its service availability from a few phones to a wide range used by 100 million users globally that stream videos to mobile screens, reports Reuters.

Dwipal Desia, YouTube’s mobile product manager was quoted to say “It’s basically the full YouTube experience you can get on the desktop – on the phone. We expect it to get fairly popular from our past experiences.”

Only now has the company made full mobile video service available to iPhone users and select Helio devices, the report continued.

A limited version of the site will become available to Verizon Wireless phone users as the technology is not quite capable yet of supporting fuller streaming services.

Desia told Reuters in an interview of the company that “Right now we are focused on building a user base on alternative screens and we’ll look at monetization in the future.”

YouTube for Mobile will be made available in 17 countries and 11 languages, the report concluded.

Enter JS-Kit. JS-Kit is a company that recently announced refinements to their Comments service. Along with their easy to install, easy to read ratings widgets, Comments Plus, makes it easier for a site to regulate what comments are being shown without having to sift through each one.

By installing only two lines of HTML, any of the JS-Kit services can be installed on a site. It is easy…and it’s free. All components are fully customizable using CSS and Templates as well. Khris Loux, CEO of JS-Kit said the importance of the comments and ratings widgets came down to simple logistics, “Publishers have one chance to gain the attention of a user. Ratings and the comments filter does the work for you. They aid both the user and the site. They give honest feedback from real people, without any derogatory or scathing reviews damaging a site’s integrity.”

Automatic SPAM protection reduces management overhead. Not only does the suite give a publisher the ability to mark as SPAM like most services, it improves on that model by giving the site administration the ability to block a commenter’s session, a commenter’s IP address or disable new comments for a post or domain. There is even the capability to allow a comment to be seen by the poster and no one else visiting the site. This is a first-of-its-kind innovation.

Now supporting over 8,500 sites and serving over 4 million page views daily at a rate of 125+ hits per second, JS-Kit is a rapidly growing company creating accessible solutions to improve the quality of sites for all sizes of publishers. When asked what the biggest challenges have been for the company, Loux answered “As easy as it is, making it easier is the biggest challenge. We want anyone and everyone to be able to use our services with total ease.”

In the last decade, the Internet has provided shoppers with many tools that have made the shopping experience easier for all of us. First, online shopping saved the time and effort of drudging through the shopping mall in the holiday season. Next, chat solutions like LivePerson enabled us to get more information about the products we wanted to buy by chatting with site representatives live while we are online. Then, shopping comparison sites like Shopping.com made it easier to find the right products at the right price.

In the last year, with the growth of social networking websites and social search, the concept of social shopping was introduced. Social Shopping is an interesting synthesis of offline shopping, which can be a social experience for friends when shopping together, and the growth of product buzz in online media and blogosphere.

With their focus on the social aspect of shopping, social search sites relied on product rankings based on buzz and user-generated comments. While user-generated comments are an important part of the online shopping experience, as proven by the importance of user comments on Amazon.com and other e-commerce sites, there can be a danger when relying too heavily on user comments for purchasing products or services.

First of all, user contributed comments tend to be less balanced then professional reviews, and often focus on a particular feature, for good or for bad. This is excellent for something like movie reviews, where your main concern is whether or not the movie was good. That is why user reviews on RottenTomatoes.com have been so successful. But when considering which MP3 Player or a DVD recorder to buy, you want a balanced review that focuses on product usability, installation and usage and complete product functionality, and not just a rave or a critique of one particular feature.

A second issue with user-contributed comments is that they provide an opportunity for company employees and PR or Ad agencies to post unbiased comments about their own products. Following  incidents about fake blog posts from WalMart and Sony Playstation from their PR and ad agencies in the last year, it became clear that user-contributed comments provides an easy way for companies to ‘inflate’ the favorable buzz about their products.

With the rise of social shopping and review websites, we have also seen the birth of product review sites, like my own company ViewScore. Though we do include user reviews in our product rankings, we put a greater weight on an aggregation of reviews given by professional sources like PC Magazine, CNET, VNUNET, Steve’s Digicams, Consumer Guide and more.

So do user-generated reviews have a place in the shopping experience? Most definitely ‘YES’.

I think user-generated reviews provide users with a way to get a laymen’s feel for a product. Sometimes the editors that write product reviews might miss some issues about product usability because their experience installing products is better than the average non-technical person. Other times, issues with a particular product might only arise after several months of product usage, long after the product has been reviewed. For example, if a user is interested in buying a printer that is more economical with ink, reviews from users who have used the printer enough times to change several printer cartridges might be more relevant. Sometimes, the very feature that the user-contributed review focuses on is the one issue most relevant to you in this product category.

So in the next 111 days, I encourage you to read user-generated product reviews to help decide which products to buy for friends and family. But first consult with the professional reviews found in product review digests sites like ViewScore to make sure that the 2-3 products in your set of consideration are the best ones to buy for your friends and family members.

The site has yet to have a URL or a name for that matter and Providence Equity Partners have given $100 million for a 10% stake in the currently labeled “New Site”.

Funding gives the development a solid foundation which will make the fall launch much stronger.

NBCU and News Corp. will use the site to predominantly showcase their own inventory online and will also accept user-generated content.

The buying agency for The Central Office of Information (COI), i-level, has been ordered to not place ads on such user-generated content sites as Facebook. The COI controls an ad budget that is worth a reported $672 million.

COI director of digital media, James Galloway was quoted in the Times as saying, “Advertising has been paused temporarily on any websites that have not provided COI and i-level with the assurances our bookings require.”

Facebook responded in a statement that assured its clients that they are working on these issues concerning the content which the ads appear next to.

The statement said, “For those UK advertisers who don’t want ads displayed alongside content that they find objectionable, we are working with them to find alternatives. UK advertisers now can choose whether o not to run their banner ads alongside group pages on Facebook.”