News: YouTube has announced on its blog a new video bar wizard that can be embedded into blogs and websites. The wizard allows you to display a menu of thumb nails of videos (grouped by a particular YouTuber’s videos, by a certain search term, or by the most recent, the most viewed, or top rated videos on YouTube). The wizard is basically like the Vod Pod I have on this blog on the right hand column, but tailored for YouTube videos. YouTube has an easy way to get your own wizard.
Analysis: This is a great idea, although it took YouTube awhile to launch the new wizard (since similar technology has been out for some time). The size of the new wizard is what I think would have been good for the overly large new advertising Video Units from YouTube (that I can’t imagine will fit easily into websites). The wizard, though, doesn’t have advertising. And, unfortunately for me, I can’t figure out if the new wizard can be embedded into WordPress blogs.