Today is Pangea Day, a global event dedicated to bringing people together through film. With its eclectic mix of movies, live music and passionate speakers, Pangea Day aims to help us see life through the eyes of others. There are live events taking place right now in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro.

But don't worry if you live far from any of these cities or couldn't make the actual festivities: On today's YouTube homepage, you'll find a sampling of the 24 short films being featured in the Pangea Day program. Selected by Pangea Day's international competition from over 2,500 submissions from over 100 countries - many of which came from YouTubers heeding last year's call for entries - these films inform and inspire, and provide a taste of what this event is all about.



Pangea Day has also set up an official YouTube group for you to share your thoughts about the videos on the homepage. And if you were able to make it to one of the live broadcasts, then go on and tell us about that, too.

Be inspired,

Sara P.
YouTube Film

View Comments  |  Comments: 4

The Short Film Corner at Cannes is one of the world's premier destinations for shorts. But you don't need to make the trip to France to see the best of what the festival has to offer, thanks to the National Film Board of Canada's Online Film Competition Cannes 2008.

In its fourth year, the contest features ten shorts, selected from among 650 films from over 40 countries. Representing an eclectic mix of languages and genres, the finalists are all available for viewing on the NFB's YouTube channel. The prize? In addition to bragging rights, the director of the winning short film will receive a professional DV camera and a portable computer with post-production software.

Ready for the best part? You determine the winner. That's right -- the winning film will be chosen by audience voting, based on the one-to-five-star rating scale you know and love.



Film jurors, it's time to cast your votes.

Sara P.
YouTube Film

View Comments  |  Comments: 3

Updates made to the Inbox and My Contacts features are now live for all YouTube users. After announcing the beta launch for these features a couple of weeks ago, we made some changes to the Inbox based on your feedback. Now mini-thumbnails appear on the list of messages for video responses and videos users have shared with you. Also, the link to view all comments has been restored in email notifications for comments made to your videos and responses to comments of your own.

We'd really like to hear what you think about the newest versions of Inbox and My Contacts, so please share your feedback with us via video, email or leave a comment on this blog.

The YouTube Team

View Comments  |  Comments: 28

In case you hadn't noticed the athletes sprinting, crawling and vaulting all over our homepage today: we're happy to present videos of the growing sport of parkour, selected by Julie Angel aka SlamCamSpam. Julie is a London-based film-maker who has been documenting the sport for the past four years, mainly with an organisation called Parkour Generations -- a team of incredible athletes based in London, including some first- and second-generation parkour practitioners, dedicated to teaching and displaying the sport.

So, what is parkour? Dan Edwardes, a member of Parkour Generations describes it this way:

"Parkour is the art of moving through your environment using only your body and the surroundings to propel yourself. It can include running, jumping, climbing, even crawling, if that is the most suitable movement for the situation. Parkour could be grasped by imagining a race through an obstacle course, the goal is to overcome obstacles quickly and efficiently, without using extraneous movement."

Parkour traces its origins to Lisses, France, and a soldier named Raymond Belle, who worked to develop efficient methods "to reach or escape." He handed down these lessons to his son David Belle, who has spent a majority of his 34-years on the planet working on these principles, and is featured in one of Julie's 12 selections. The sport, or discipline, has drawn on myriad sources, been inspired by a number of notable individuals and evolved through several traditions to arrive at the modern iteration known as parkour. The sport's beauty and broad appeal may lie in the fact that it's not that different from what we all did as children: run, jump, roll. Parkour turns our confining concrete landscapes into a big playground.

We couldn't help notice the rising profile of parkour on our site and are proud to play a role in spreading it worldwide. The sport's bounding popularity is growing, in part, thanks to the spread of online video sharing, and, well, YouTube. Parkour may be the first such sport in history to have this symbiotic relationship with online video.

We hope this inspires you to learn more. Before you go running into the street, though, please understand that parkour can be dangerous if not practised correctly, please seek experienced trainers and practice diligently.

Allez!
Andrew B.
YouTube Sports

View Comments  |  Comments: 2

Last month, we posted about our efforts to make YouTube as open as possible and shared a few examples of partners who were integrating YouTube content into their applications. Today, we'd like to point out another example.

Google Docs is a free, web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application that allows you to share and collaborate with others in real-time. The Docs team just announced on their blog that you can now search for and insert YouTube videos into your presentation slides. This means that you'll be able to insert your favourite videos in your presentations and play them to your audience.

To see this new feature in action, check out this published presentation.

Haven't heard of Docs? Watch this video that explains what Google Docs is:



The YouTube Team

View Comments  |  Comments: 0

You asked, BBC London mediated and they answered: the three men most likely to assume one of the highest profile jobs in UK politics have responded to your questions and the results make fascinating viewing.

While Crime, Transport and Housing topped the list of burning issues you wanted the London Mayoral candidates to address (which have been reflected in the videos we have featured on the UK homepage today), Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick also tackled subjects as diverse as drugs policy, Islamophobia and… well… haircare:



As this is the first election-based politics project we have run out the UK, we would love to hear your thoughts on how you felt the process went and what you did or didn’t like about the initiative so that we can feed these back into our plans for the General Election (whenever that may come to pass). Looking over the videos, one thing that the YouTube approach to the political process does seem to have provided is an interesting level of relaxation in the candidates and – dare we say it – a glimpse of the personalities behind the politicians. Next thing you know we may even start believing they’re human after all…

Have fun,
The YouTube Team

View Comments  |  Comments: 9

As you have probably noticed, we recently introduced a raft of updates across YouTube. While some of these affected all site domains, others were focused on the non-Global homepages (of which the UK is one). Having given these some time to bed down, we would love to hear what you think of two of the updates in particular: changes to the how we generate the Most Viewed toplist and a new approach to the Channels information.

MOST VIEWED IN THE UK

Since the UK homepage was launched last year, the Most Viewed videos of the day, the week, the month or of all time were listed on the UK page according to territory. This is to say that if you told us at sign-up that you were located in the UK and uploaded a video, it would be eligible to make the list provided it generated enough clicks. While this system worked well enough, we felt that it gave a slightly skewed window onto what users in the UK were actually watching, not to mention leaving the list open to a degree of manipulation (no matter how gentle, as in this fallofautumndistro video):



The Most Viewed list is now generated according to what users located in the UK are watching, which means that the videos listed can have been uploaded anywhere in the world. One side-effect of this is that the chart can look out of synch, as the total number of clicks does not necessarily tally with the number of UK-based users who have watched the video – so please bear this in mind when offering any feedback.

CHANNELS PAGE

One of the big things that we at YouTube UK hoped to achieve after launching the UK homepage was to enable local users to find one another more easily, whether that be by showcasing local talent in the featured area or generating charts drawn from UK users. We have now achieved the latter on the Channels page, where you will be able to identify the Most Subscribed UK user of all time (congratulations Charlieissocoollike) along with the local Comedian, Director, Guru, Musician and Partner channels that are generating most interest. To date these lists were drawn from Global performance figures, and if you still want to track who is hot worldwide, then just navigate to the Global homepage and head for the Channels page.

We are working hard to give all of our users in the UK the best possible insights into what is happening on their local site. Do these updates help or hinder that effort? Let us know, either by leaving a comment below or mailing us here

Have fun,
The YouTube Team

View Comments  |  Comments: 28

We are very excited to announce some big changes to our policy enforcement systems. Having clear rules and fair consequences are genuinely important to us and these improvements have been a long time coming.

STRIKES THAT EXPIRE

It didn't seem fair that a user who uploads three videos that violate the Community Guidelines over the span of a year was being treated the same as someone who uploads those same videos over the course of a week. To change this, we've made it so that violations are now rescinded after six months. Accounts that had one or two warnings (as of April 16, 2008) for Community Guidelines (or Terms of Use) violations have been given a clean slate and are going forward under the new system, too!

Note that this does not apply to copyright claims, which don't expire and are not being cleared.

NEW NOTIFICATIONS

It used to be that if a video was removed for violating the Community Guidelines or due to a claim of copyright infringement, the user would be sent a notice via email. But these notices sometimes get caught by spam filters or go unread. The new system also displays the notice on YouTube the next time they access the site.

MUTING ACCOUNTS

We are experimenting with ways of correcting some types of abusive behaviour that aren't as harsh or as permanent as suspending users. What we've come up with is to temporarily mute users, so that they can still use the site and watch videos, but they can't post new content. Right now it is set up to affect users who have two Community Guidelines warnings in a six-month period and will last two weeks. Let us know what you think, if it works well we may expand it to help address other kinds of abuse as well.

These are just a few of the first visible changes made to the way these things work. There is a lot of work being done behind the scenes to continue to improve upon them. We look forward to your feedback and further enhancing the safety and experience of the YouTube community.

For more information, please see our new Help Centre article on General Policy Enforcement Information.

The YouTube Team

View Comments  |  Comments: 16

Some very cool new features have just been unveiled on YouTube, check 'em out...

VIDEO SHARING IMPROVEMENTS

We revamped the video watch page by adding more sharing features and a new streamlined design to the Share, Favourite, Playlists and Flag sections. We now show some top social sharing sites directly on the video watch page, making it easier for you to share your favourite videos with your network. These top sites are also personalised based on your usage - so if you Digg more often than you Facebook, Digg will show up instead. Video comments and responses have also been reorganised into a "Commentary" tab, including thumbnails for video responses and a handy scroll bar for easier navigation. The new "Statistics & Data" tab houses collapsible sections for recent ratings, video honors and sites linking to that video.

ADVANCED SEARCH OPTIONS

New advanced search options are now available anywhere you see a search field on YouTube. Just click "advanced search" to choose the results you want, based on different key word combinations such as exact phrases, all words, excluding certain words, etc.. You can also hone down your results further to find videos matching specific upload criteria like language, category, date uploaded, duration of video, as well as videos uploaded within a specific time period (i.e. "This Month, "This Week" and "Today").

MULTIFILE UPLOADER FOR MAC

When we launched our multifile uploader for Windows PC users last year, we promised to follow it up with a Mac-friendly version. Now Mac users can download the software and access the Multifile Upload page where you can upload several videos at once. Each video may be up to 10 minutes in length and up to 1GB in size, and all will be available in My Videos after processing.

Now, for the video version of these exciting changes, here's Mr. Pzottolo with this edition of YouTube News:



Keep your eyes peeled for more updates coming soon,
The YouTube Team

View Comments  |  Comments: 21

When we announced our free analytics tool called YouTube Insight two weeks ago, we promised to update Insight with new features and information fairly quickly, and we weren't kidding. Today we're releasing a new feature that helps you better understand the viewing trends of your YouTube videos: a discovery tab that shows how viewers found your video, whether by searching on YouTube or Google, browsing under "related videos", receiving a link to the video from an email or website, or watching it in an embedded player away from YouTube. Insight even breaks down the specific YouTube or Google search queries that led to your video, as well as the external websites driving traffic to your content. (Insight will show up to 50 inbound links.)

We think you'll find this helpful in several ways. For example, users can learn how different parts of their identity on the web (perhaps their pages on MySpace or Facebook) are effective in driving traffic to their content. Partners can reach out to form relationships with those publishers who consistently point readers to their videos on YouTube. And since advertisers can now access reports detailing the search queries that lead viewers to their videos, they can make more informed decisions about the keywords and bids they select to appear on Google.com.

You can find these new metrics under the "Discovery" tab within the Insight dashboard. Click on the "Insight" button under "Account > My Videos."

As always, we're keen to hear about new ways in which you'll put Insight's resources to good use. Let us know what you think by commenting below.

The YouTube Team

View Comments  |  Comments: 7