youtube

YouTube, the online video giant, announced plans yesterday to expand its advertising program to a number of amateur movie-makers. Ads will be spliced into the videos, and the creators will get the chance to share the revenue with Google, YouTube's corporate parent.

The ad program itself isn't brand new. YouTube picked a small group of established content producers to test its pilot program. But now the site will let users apply to be part of the revenue-generating machine. The favorites will be those who post frequently, have a loyal following, and stick to YouTube's rules. Currently, it's available in the US and Canada, but will probably expand soon, if the community's demands have anything to do with it. The very first comment to YouTube's blog post on the subject: When are you going to expand this to Slovenia? It's the big question on all of our minds.—Gregory Mone

Via CNN

Granted, it's not even in beta yet, so this isn't entirely fair, but if SciVee, a new website being billed as the YouTube of science, is really going to reach the people, the presentations will really need to evolve. Right now the site consists of a few video presentations from biologists. The material is interesting, and there's a cool feature that lets you follow along in the actual published paper as the speaker presents his or her work. But the overall effect is really no different than what you'd get if you trained cameras on presenters at a biology conference, then posted the clips on the Web. And that might be part of the point of this site—it gives scientists a new, slightly less formalized way to communicate the ideas in a new paper to their peers. But part of the stated mission is also to reach a wider audience, and to do that these scientists are going to need a different approach. Step One: Getting rid of the powerpoints. It's not too, too hard to get most scientists to sum up their research in layman's terms, but once they get a few of those slides in front of them, they revert to speaking the very technical language of their peers, not the masses. Again, though, it's only in the alpha phase, and it's a great idea. So let's hope it works.—Gregory Mone

If its not clear already, I cant get enough of the World Cup. Ive been catching as much action as possible during lunch hour, Ive installed a Firefox extension that instantly notifies me of any goals scored, Ive been scouring YouTube for fun nuggets (like this amazing Tiger-esque clip of Ronaldinho showing off his crazy skills), and I wrote about Adidass advanced new ball a few days back.

Today webmistress Megan pointed me to another trove of Cup-related goodness from our friends at NewScientist.com. Theyve assembled a number of soccer-related studies and papers produced by like-minded football-crazed scientists the world over. So check it out—and learn why we humans may never be able to accurately make offsides calls, why teams with red shirts (Spain, Iran, Switzerland) might be the teams to watch this year, advanced synthetic materials (previously covered by PopSci) making better goalie gloves and plenty of other interesting tidbits. As for me, if Im going to do any uniform-based betting, my moneys on the Netherlandss sweet orange crush. —John Mahoney

Related:Better Headgear Through ChemistryA Rounder Ball For the World Stage

Home movies don´t have to be long and boring. Now that even the cheapest digital cameras can capture movies and nearly all computers come with free editing software, today´s homemade flick can be just a few minutes-ideal for filming
Johnny´s first basket or making a hilarious short that´ll turn you into a Web celebrity.