If you’ve visited Myspace, Facebook, or any number of other sites on the internet today you have invariably been exposed to a YouTube video. YouTube has seen the number of its uploads grow over 1700% in the past several months, and with the advent of the “Smart Phone”, one need not look far to find the cause. With their increasing popularity, and increasing ease of use, Smart Phones are becoming a way for more and more people to share their lives with each other. It follows then that if the Smart Phone is the brush with which we paint our individual life stories, then YouTube is fast becoming the canvas.

The Apple, in its design of the iPhone 3GS, has gone to great lengths to put the power of mobile video into the hands of any user. The iPhone 3GS’s built in video functionality is impressive to say the least, and its ease of use has no doubt added to the popularity of this particular Smart Phone. The impact that the new iPhone 3GS has had on the rate of YouTube’s mobile uploads has been staggering to say the least, with uploads increasing over 400% in the first six days since its release.

This is, however, only the beginning, and as more and more people become familiar with the technologies and platforms available to share their videos with friends and family, YouTube’s numbers will continue to increase exponentially, a thought that has not gone unnoticed by other cell phone manufacturers who are scrambling to design and market competitive alternative options for consumers.

If you’ve logged on to the internet any time in recently, you more than likely have stumbled upon a headline or two (or likely more) about Microsoft’s exclusion of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) from their upcoming European release of Windows 7. In fact, Microsoft will not be offering any web browser as part of the Windows 7 operating system software.

Blogger, Google’s proprietary publishing platform, saw the release of a new Custom Search Box gadget. This gadget, originally released in Beta form (then called Blogger In Draft), allows for a broader area of focus within a particular search. It accomplishes this by including in searches readers search posts, linked web pages, blog roll blogs, and shared link list pages. AJAX Search API’s allow for the new search gadget to aesthetically blend into any blog and, in addition, will update the custom linked search engine whenever your blog, blog list, or link lists are updated. This will allow for more inclusive yet focused searching.