YouTube have announced, via a new blog post, that the look of the massively popular video sharing website will be undergoing some major changes in the upcoming months.

In an effort to obtain some critical feedback from users, YouTube has also elected to provide a sneak preview of what the ‘Videos’ page will soon look like.

When compared to the current video browsing page, the changes seem to be very subtle, but the folks at the most popular online video community are hoping that it is enough to get people started talking, which many have begun doing.

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The Daily Show is a brilliant satirical show which everyone has probably heard of, even if they aren’t particularly fans of the type of humour.

It’s a great showcase for the satirical jabs of Jon Stewart and pals, as they round on any politician or organisation who has recently acted stupidly. 

If you are one of the many fans, you might have been overjoyed to hear that Comedy Central (which is part of MTV, which in turn is part of Viacom) recently launched a website with 13,000 or so clips from the show, including some of the most-loved episodes.

Finally, you may have thought to yourself — after months of fighting with YouTube over clips from the show (which routinely appear and then are quickly removed), Viacom has decided that giving viewers what they want over the Internet is the right way to go. Bravo.

Not If You Are Canadian

The only problem with that rosy little scenario is that Viacom’s largesse — like every other U.S. TV network that has decided to stream popular shows from their website — is completely unavailable to Canadian viewers (and to viewers in other countries as well). 

You can go to the website and click on a video, but you don’t get anything. To add insult to injury, the pre-roll advertising spot that Viacom has sold for the clip plays just fine, but is followed by a black screen — a screen that might as well say “Hey non-U.S. viewers — look at all the stuff you can’t watch.”

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YouTube yesterday launched a localised Australian version of the site to better cater for their 3 million odd Australian users.

Even before the site gets up and running, the Australian government is already threatening to look in to the kind of material which is posted on it.

The Federal government is promising to look at the legislation in place and see if the content put online can be controlled in any way.

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Mac screencasters like myself are relatively limited in our choice of options when it comes to screen recording applications. 

In my humble opinion, the only two worth your time of day are iShowU and Snapz Pro, both of which offer different options.

I ditched Snapz a long while back thanks to the instant rendering and extensive options available in iShowU, which I now choose to use exclusively.

However, as of this week there is another contender - the aptly named from Araelium Group.

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Google have announced they are to partner with Nielsen, the company which measures television ratings across various demographics.

Nielsen has set top boxes in a large number of American households, and these will now be used to see how many people watch the television adverts that Google sell.

This is an agreement designed to help companies who have already purchased Google ads determine what sort of value for money they are getting, as well as entice potential new advertisers in to signing up with the company.

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There I said it! I know lots of people won’t agree with me and think the owner of TV-Links.co.uk is some sort of martyr who is fighting our cause against the big copyright Mongols but that is bullshit.

What is TVLinks & What Happened?

For those of you that don’t know TV-Links.co.uk is a site that was full of links to pirated TV shows on sites like YouTube, MySpace Video, DailyMotion etc.

Millions of people flocked to TVLinks each month to watch these pirated shows and can you blame them? Content owners have put so many barriers between people and the videos they want to watch: DRM, high DVD prices, not putting shows online… the list goes on.

TVLinks was recently shut down and the owner arrested in the UK.

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There were a bunch of stories a while ago about TorrentSpy and the bunch of seemingly mixed signals that were routinely being sent from the site to its users.

At the time, no-one knew whether or not it was safe to venture there any more.

This was after rumors about alleged records of visitors IPs being kept and forcefully transferred to the lovely folk over at the MPAA.

You may also be aware of the many still unanswered questions floating about the blogosphere about the torrent-site-vs-Big-Media battle waged oh-so-unscrupulously in weeks and months past.

Well, yesterday Wired.com was so kind as to publish a story by David Kravets about a major component of the TorrentSpy debacle. 

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