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If you enjoy watching videos online, then you should get acquainted with DropAMovie. This metasearch engine allows you to search for content from Youtube, DailyMotion, MySpaceTV, LiveVideo, and MetaCafe all at once. The search is simple enough. As with any other engine, all you’ve got to do is type in a keyword such as horror, or motorcycles. Choose to search all sites, or select one. The results will be displayed as thumbnails in rows of five for each video network. You can hit play to watch any clip from within DropAMovie. If you’ve registered, you can add videos to your favorites and categorize them. You can also save your searches. All your information can be accessed at www.dropamovie.com/yourusername. DropAMovie is free for everyone.

WeShow makes the less than humble claim in its tagline of ‘selecting and organizing the best videos worldwide for your entertainment.’ Just what is the best? By WeShow standards that high honor goes to an Ode to Zach Braff of Garden State fame, the Arctic Monkeys’ brainstorm, a talking parrot called Riley, and some girl’s fridge theory among others. Videos are conveniently categorized by subject matter. Dancing, fashion, celebrities, health, even educational videos are given their due. WeShow even has their own channel. If it’s videos you want, they’ve got it.

Metacafe is a place were users can upload, watch, rate, and comment on short videos. You can sort through the videos by their ranking, how many times they´ve been discussed, how many times they´ve been viewed, or how recent they are. If you post a video, you stand to make money if it is well liked from their “Producer Rewards”. After 20,000 viewings, you can make $100 and $5 ever 1,000 views after that. You can see how much each video has made, so if you want to see what the competition is, you know right where to find it. $250,000 has already been given away to 200 contributors.

ClipNabber allows users to download videos from their favorite video sites like Youtube and Metacafe. All you’ve got to do is copy and paste the URL of the video into the box provided on ClipNabber’s homepage. ClipNabber will then give you a link from which you can download your video to put on your iPod or iPhone, or wherever else you want to watch it. They are constantly updating their site and adding more video websites, so you’ll have plenty to choose from. Even if a site changes its code, the folks behind ClipNabber will be on top of it as soon as possible. There’s also a bookmarklet so you can download videos with a simple click. It’s totally free to use too.

Our number-one favorite place to waste time on the Web, YouTube is the only service in our group that could possibly lay claim both to uncovering scandals and to posing quirky questions to Democratic presidential candidates.

But the biggest of all video sharing sites limits your videos to just 10 minutes, and its Flash 7 video quality wasn't quite up to par with its rivals: Color gradients were more noticeable, and colors were muted. Here's hoping that the higher quality H.264-format videos that YouTube creates for AppleTV and Apple iPhone playback will eventually be accessible by everyone.

YouTube remains incredibly easy to use. Its beefy servers swallowed our upload in no time at all (under a minute), and our video was live not long after. The recently upgraded embedded player has a clean design, though it puts a bottom-right watermark on your video, and it can be customized with different color and video thumbnail options.

You're also able to keep your video private (viewable by you and 25 selected friends), and choose whether or not people can embed your video on their Web site.

YouTube has a booming community; there are detailed user channel creation tools, and the site's popularity and ability to turn up in Google searches will likely deliver the biggest audience to your video. Unfortunately, YouTube's revenue-sharing Partner Program is currently limited to big-name content creators and selected individual, prolific, and popular content creators.

But YouTube does have some neat tricks up its sleeve. An area called TestTube lets you try out possible future features like Remixer, an online, flash-based video-editing tool. First deployed by rival Photobucket and powered by Adobe Premiere Express, it lets you remix or add transitions and titles to videos, without impacting the original uploaded file.

Bottom line: Its video quality isn't the greatest, but YouTube can't be beat for drawing the widest possible audience.

Flickr is one of the most popular photo storage and sharing sites around, and there's a good reason for that. It's free and easy to use, and it features various methods for sorting, categorizing and tagging images. The interface is attractive, and it's fun to browse. People can comment and rate pictures, and you can make all or just some photos private or only viewable by friends and family. Flickr is easily one of the best photo storage and sharing sites available. If nothing else, Flickr is useful as a private gallery to backup images off-site from your hard drive.

Pros

• Free and easy to use
• Options for securing your Flickr photos
• Great tagging and organizing system
• Can be incorporated into personal blogs and Web sites
• Can use Creative Commons copyright licenses with photos

Cons

• Easy for visitors to steal public photos
• Must pay small fee or unlimited storage

Description

• Attractive interface featuring thumbnails and the ability to move around to images with the same tags, sets or groups.
• Various upload methods, including by the Web, email and mobile phone.
• Can make photos into prints, calling cards, photo-books, slideshow-DVDs and postage stamps.

Guide Review - Flickr

Flickr could be considered the gold standard when it comes to photo storage and sharing. A trend setter in the world of photo sharing, this site's robust features range from extensive organization capabilities to image-specific privacy settings to the ability to incorporate images into other Web sites. In testing, I have found it easy to both view others' photos and to upload your own photos.

The Price of Flickr

The price tag is a wonderful aspect as well. Users get up to 100 MB of image upload monthly for free. A pro account allows for unlimited photo storage at a bargain rate of $24.95. If you simply compare it to several online backup sites (most with far fewer features specific to images), those can run $10 monthly and still have upload limits.

Copyright and Privacy on Flickr

If you are uploading photos to the Web, the issue of security and privacy is a major factor. A downside to Flickr is that public photos, unless you specifically add a watermark on your own, can be nabbed by anyone. To avoid that, you can make all or some pictures private or only available to friends and family (who must also join Flickr). You can also incorporate your chosen Creative Commons copyright license to inform people of usage rights, but that doesn't mean people will abide by it.

Flickr on Your Site or Blog

A great aspect of Flickr is the blogging options. You can have Flickr photos automatically rotate on your blog in a sidebar. You can even send photos directly to your blog from your cell phone.

Organizing Photos on Flickr

Another way that Flickr stands out is through its various organization abilities. You can put photos into sets and groups, tag them with keywords, or even show them on a map displaying the location in which the photo was shot.

K.A.