Earlier this summer I got more involved in leading core product at YouTube in addition to our mobile and API/syndication/distribution work. Video is becoming just another type of media (like text or images) — ubiquitous to create, share, distribute, monetize – so you can imagine how exciting it is to be the world’s largest collection and community of it. We get hours and hours of new content uploaded every minute!

So one of the areas where you’re going to see more features is helping our community broadcast more about how they use YouTube. Uploaders can become stars on YouTube but it’s difficult for people contributing to the community in other ways to become as discoverable.

Last week we started to dip our toe in the water here with a new module that can be displayed on your channel page – the “Videos Rated Box.” When you turn this on, it will display the last five videos you rated and the rating you gave them. Additionally it will qualify your rating to appear on that video’s playback page for a while after you’ve rated it. (if you’re a YT user, to turn this on go to your channel design page and click the check box. Yes, i know channel mgmt is confusing – we’re gonna fix that too.).

The virtuous cycle here is that if you rate videos, others can discover you through your ratings and then subscribe to your channel to see new videos you’ve favorited, etc. We want to give tastemakers the ability to implicitly and explicitly share.

Anyway, eventually our goal is to increase the types of social currency that all different user segments can accrue on the site – i.e. how to recognized and rewarded for your contributions to the community, even if you’re not necessarily someone who creates video.

hope you enjoy and always feel free to let me know what you think