Love it or hate it, there’s no doubt that “citizen journalism” — the trend where ‘regular people’ record video, snap photos, and tweet live from breaking news events —  is quickly gaining steam. One of the biggest catalysts for the trend has been YouTube, which gives people an easy way to upload and share the video footage they shoot from the heat of the action. And while we’ve seen some media sites, like CNN’s iReport, attempt to take advantage of this user submitted content, many news sites haven’t found a good way to integrate it. Today, YouTube is launching a new application that looks to make this easy for all media organizations. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new open source application will allow news orgs to integrate a video upload tool directly into their sites, where they can accept and review user uploaded footage.

The new tool will allow news organizations to screen video uploads as they come in, and use the best clips for their broadcasts and on their websites.

YouTube has just announced that it has partnered with Univision, the United States’ most popular Spanish language network, to bring a selection of its content to the world’s most popular video site. The agreement includes rights both to short clips and full length content.

Videos will be drawn from the Univision network, TeleFutura, and Galavision, and will also include footage from special events. Content will be rolled out over the course of the next few months. This is the first time Univision content will be available on the web outside of the network’s own properties, though this is a nonexclusive deal (don’t be surprised if we see similar content pop up on Hulu, TV.com, or other media portals soon).

Last January Warner Music Group forced YouTube to remove all of its music from the site, citing disputes over royalty payments. This led to an outcry from users, who created protest videos once YouTube started muting or pulling down any user-generated content that contained WMG songs as background music. Today, those songs are starting to make their way back to the world’s largest video portal: music videos for Madonna, Green Day, and Bee Gees, among others, are now live on YouTube for the first time in nearly a year.

That’s great news. But the new videos will look a bit odd to anyone who has used YouTube before — they’re all decked out with extensive branding, including colorful backgrounds and large links to the artist’s products. Warner alone has the ability to do this, because of a deal it negotiated that gives it far more control over its pages than other content partners have.

You may not have noticed it, but YouTube is evolving. Unlike sites like Facebook, where even a subtle change in a header’s rounding gets noticed, YouTube has so much going on that it’s often easy to miss one of the site’s new features. But they’re there, and more are coming soon. Earlier this week the YouTube team invited me over to talk about how the video portal is approaching its role as an inherently social site, and what it’s doing to help surface videos that users will find interesting from the oceans of content that’s uploaded every day.

YouTube PM Brian Glick describes YouTube’s social trends with three F’s: Find, Follow, and Feed. The first two are fairly self explanatory. Find refers to the process by which you find people on the site that you may already know or are interested in, whose activity you can then Follow through the site’s subscriptions (you can granularly control which items you’d like to be alerted to, like Subscriptions, Favorited items, or new video uploads).

The ads are destroying YouTube. At least this one is. It is a video ad for sustainable energy company from Spain called Acciona. Yeah, I had never heard of them either.

The video starts with this Euro-dude in a suit starting to blow up and crack apart like he’s made from plaster. Halfway through, the actual video player crack in half, and all of the surrounding parts of the site shake and fall away, while an annoying voiceover is saying something about rebirth. I don’t know, maybe it makes more sense in Spanish.

A source just tipped us on some interesting changes Google-owned YouTube has made that give its partners more control over the blocking of video content they upload to the service.

Basically, there are two new buttons in the interface for partners. One says ‘Block by Country’ and provides content partners with the ability to geo-block a single video rather than an entire account, an oft-requested feature that allows partners to restrict the geographical rights for specific videos. This can be helpful for blocking a clip in a region where it might be culturally offensive or where rights issues prevent an account for having distribution rights in a handful of countries.

The second button reads ‘Enable Auto Block outside Ownership’ (yes, that’s a confusing name). The purpose of the button is similar to the first button, but is for content owners who only have rights to a video in a single region. Using this feature they can quickly claim rights to that one region, while automatically blocking access everywhere else.

“YouTube is down for maintenance and will be back shortly,” says the site. The site first went down at around 9:30 California time. Or possibly earlier, we’re sorting through the Twitter barrage – “is down” is a trending topic right now.

Most companies plan maintenance for short periods in the middle of the night, so our guess is this is maintenance of the unplanned sort. 2+ hours and counting isn’t a trivial amount of downtime. We’ve asked Google for a statement on when it might be back up, and what caused the outage.

Update: Erictric says this may be part of a YouTube store rollout. I’m dubious.

Update 2: A YouTube spokesperson says: “We are aware that some users are having difficulty accessing videos on YouTube. We are working hard to fix the issue and will have the site back to normal as soon as possible.”

YouTube has just posted a series of videos highlighting one the more impressive feats of Mother Nature: the colorful transition from summer to fall. It may sound a bit lame, but if you’ve ever enjoyed the changing colors of autumn leaves or the charming landscape of a local pumpkin patch, the videos are well worth a look (they remind me a bit of the Planet Earth series that came out a few years ago). You can find the four videos featured at the top of YouTube’s homepage, or you can check out the ones we’ve embedded below.

Over the last six months we’ve heard quite a bit about Vevo, a premium content site that’s been called a ‘Hulu for music videos’. The site was originally founded by UMG in a partnership with YouTube and has since added Sony Music Group, with negotiations onging with EMI and Warner. But while plenty has been said about its partners, we still haven’t seen much that shows what the site actually looks like.

Today it looks like Vevo decided to peek out from under the covers, though its appearance was short lived. Our tipster noticed a number of artists who had apparently been given Vevo-linked YouTube accounts, with names like EminemVEVO and DonnaSummerVEVO. Videos from these users look nearly identical to the music videos scattered throughout YouTube, but with one key difference: there’s VEVO branding on the bottom right hand side of the player.

Initial reports said that hundreds of thousands of people watched YouTube’s Live U2 concert on Sunday night. Then reports yesterday raised the estimate to 2.5 million. Double that, and then double it again. 10 million is the real number of live streams that YouTube did that night, according to Variety.

That’s massive, and it’s obviously the biggest live streaming event YouTube has ever done. But even more impressive is just how smoothly it went. I watched about half of the two and a half hour show, and if there were any interruptions, I didn’t see any. I didn’t even see any hiccups, it was that good. I had the show running full screen on my desktop computer, and it was pretty great picture quality for live streaming video.

It’s kind of crazy to think that the band U2 has been popular for about 30 years now. Over that three decade span, the group has had music that has ranged from brilliant (War, The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby) to self-indulgent (Pop) to a bit odd (Zooropa). But there has been one constant: They’ve always been a great live act. And tonight, a lot of the world will be able to see that from their computer screens.

U2 is streaming their concert tonight from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California live to YouTube. As the site announced earlier this week, some 16 countries will be able to view the show live: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, U.K., U.S. (other countries were presumably excluded due to streaming rights). The show will start at 8:30 PM PT tonight, and you can find it here.

VEVO, the YouTube-powered “Hulu for music videos” which to date was a joint venture between Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, is gaining a new founding shareholder.

VEVO has just announced a ’strategic’ investment was made by Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), a giant of a media company with headquarters in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, reports MediaMemo. The specifics of the deal remain under cover, but the rumor mill suggests the company is being valued at around $300 million.

YouTube is on the path to profitability in the “not-too-distant future,” Google reiterated today during its third quarter earnings call. And while that may sounds all well and good, they actually had some more specific impressive numbers to back it up.

One is that YouTube is now monetizing over a billion video views a week. Last week, YouTube announced that it was serving over 1 billion video views a day, so if you do the math there, it means that YouTube is monetizing one every seven video views.

We’ve been reporting a lot about Chrome OS the past few days. Possible features, screenshots, early builds — lots of good stuff. And tomorrow was promising to bring even more as yes, there’s an event partially dealing with Chrome OS scheduled to take place on Google’s Mountain View campus. But sadly, we’ve been banned from the event.

Truth be told, all press is now banned from the event, we were told this evening. And that sucks because just yesterday we were confirmed as attendees and had planned to report on what we saw and heard. But then PC World and The Next Web spilled the beans on the event, and Google decided to ban the press.

As the most popular video site on the planet, YouTube has a lot of content to present to users at any given time (the site says that 20 hours of footage are uploaded every minute). That poses a challenge to premium content owners and other content creators looking to attract attention, which is why YouTube also offers a premium ‘Promoted Videos’ feature that lets you pay to expose your video to other users. And today, it’s making it easier to launch a Promoted Video campaign: users will now be able to manage their Promoted Videos directly from the AdWords platform.

AdWords is Google’s bread-and-butter ad platform that plenty of brands and businesses already use to place their ads outside of YouTube, so this will help streamline the purchase process.

The video below has racked up a little more than 6,000 views at the time of this writing. I’d be surprised if it doesn’t top a couple of millions by the end of this weekend.

Enjoy Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus’ rap about the reasons for her quitting Twitter, which caused quite a ruckus earlier this week, for reasons known only to some people other than myself.

Head on over to YouTube right now and there’s a minor change that’s sure to catch your eye: the site’s unmistakeable logo has been modified to include a new “1BN” banner, with the words “1 billion views per day!” beneath it. It’s obviously a huge milestone for the site, but it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — back in June we reported that YouTube was seeing over 1.2 billion views a day, and it’s likely above that by now.

So why the spiffy new banner now? Turns out, it was three years ago to the day that Google acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion.

Buma/Stemra, a Dutch collective rights society that represents the interests of copyright holders (some 19,000 composers, authors and publishers), is the topic of the day in the Dutch blogosphere and beyond. The association has managed to wield itself into the eye of the storm because of the introduction of new, exorbitantly high digital music licensing fees, and its stated willingness to fine bloggers up to €21,6 (roughly $31.8) per music video they dare embed on their websites or blogs.

Buma/Stemra has commissioned a local startup called Teezir to build an Audio Detection Solution which the company claims is capable of automatically detecting copyrighted audio on Dutch websites. Should the association use the crawler to find out you embedded a YouTube video featuring material from a composer or performer who is registered with Buma/Stemra, then they aim to charge you their new annual license fees for embedded content (calculate them here).

One of the most interesting but under-appreciated processes in building a web site is the amount of testing that goes on to figure out exactly what should go where. Many startups rely on A/B testing as they roll out new features, and the big guys — namely very popular sites like Google and Facebook — conduct extensive usability studies that can involve interviews, eye monitoring, and more. Today YouTube has revealed some of the action that goes on behind the scenes as it continues to tweak its all-important ‘Watch’ page — the site you see when you’re actually viewing a video on YouTube.

YouTube has just held a conference call to announce that it has negotiated a deal with Warner Music Group, the major record label that pulled off the world’s most popular video portal after feeling shortchanged by the revenue its videos were driving. Many details of the deal have been rumored for the last few days, and were confirmed accurate: WMG will be putting its full catalog back on YouTube and will have the ability to sell its own advertising against both its premium music videos as well as user generated content that features a WMG song. Revenue will be shared with YouTube but most will be going to WMG. The deal also includes rights to Warner’s Chappell Music publishing arm.

The deal could prove to be a sign of things to come for YouTube’s premium content, especially since the site has left the door open to special branding on Warner’s music pages that would make it clear who the content owner is. YouTube says that it’s working with WMG to define the optimal experience for the user and the artist, and this may well wind up looking significantly different from YouTube’s standard viewing page.