This is off-topic and pretty stupidtacular – but ntr23 has posted a really fun set of iPhone unpacking photos.

Watch out for the almost-tragic iPhone unpacking industrial accident.

Google’s problem with YouTube is even bigger than many thought.

More than 97% of YouTube’s videos are deadweight – videos that the company can’t put ads on.

According to Silicon Alley Insider’s Michael Learmonth:

We know Google’s (GOOG) YouTube is a tough sell for advertisers. But video site’s sales team may be having an even tougher time than recent reports suggest.

YouTube sales manager Brian Cusack says YouTube is able to sell ads against “less than 3%” of the total videos on the site. That shaves more than a point off the 4% floated by the WSJ two weeks ago, which cited “one person familiar with the matter.”

As pressure increases for Google to make money with YouTube, videos that are deadweight financially or, worse, billion dollar legal liabilities are likely to make it difficult for the company to compete against sites, like Hulu, that can make money on all of their videos.

Embed Generator is a free online tool designed to make it easier to create customized embed code for YouTube videos.

On one screen, you can set:

• Autoplay preferences
• Size
• Colors
• Toggle fullscreen
• Looping
• Related video preferences
• High quality option.

Below, I’ve embedded a customized player for the popular Evolution of Dance video.

The example player has been customized to:

• Display at a larger size
• Use high quality video
• Display related video

via Allan

We reported last week on incompatibilities between Mighty Seek’s PodPress, the popular free podcasting add-on for WordPress, and the recently-announced WordPress 2.6.

Reader Phillip Molly Malone suggests a workaround that’s available at the PodPress forum:

After spending hours digging through the code and looking at the database, I discovered that the problems between podpress 8.8 and WP 2.6 is the new revisions feature. To disable them (and thus maintain compatibility with podpress), just add:

define (‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 0);

to your wp-config.php and the problem disappears.

If you haven’t upgraded to WordPress 2.6, and you’re a PodPress user, you’ll want to hold off until a patch is released. If you’ve upgraded already, though, and your install is broken, you may want to give this a try.

Auttomatic has announced that WordPress for iPhone is now available (iTunes App Store link).

Features include:

• Embedded Safari previews of posts
• Full support for tags & categories
• Photo support for both camera phone pics and library photos
• Support for multiple blogs
• Ability to password protect a post, save as draft, or mark for later review
• Auto-recovery feature recovers posts interrupted by phone calls

This is great news. Not only is WordPress for iPhone free, but it’s open source, which means it’s likely to be built upon and updated frequently.

Andrew Baron, creator of New York-based daily video podcast Rocketboom, sent us a note this morning, and asked that we spread the word about some job openings there:

“Rocketboom is expanding its content offerings and looking to hire several writers to join a daily team of writers for the online show. We’re looking for extremely creative, journalistic, funny and clever writers who are plugged into internet culture via daily news, blogs, social networks, video sites with a heavy emphasis on the arts and technology.

http://www.rocketboom.com

Full-time, part-time and contribution based positions available

Please contact jobs at rocketboom dot com with serious inquiries.”

NBC has announced that it will be using Internet video as a sort of minor league training grown for late-night television.

It’s announced that Jimmy Fallon will be the Late Night replacement for Conan O’Brien when Mr. O’Brien takes over the Tonight show next year.

Lorne Michaels, Executive Producer for Late Night said that he wants Mr. Fallon to work out as many of the rough spots in his presentation as possible in online performances.

“I expect that we’ll do something like five or 10 minutes,” Mr. Michaels said. “I’m going to post them at 12:30 every night, so people will begin to look for Jimmy at that time.”

Michaels hopes to avoid the sort of transition that NBC had with O’Brien, who struggled for months to find his style after taking on the Late Night desk after David Letterman.

“Conan needed time to find his show,” Mr. Michaels said. “I think this will help Jimmy to do that.”

Networks are likely to try this more and more. Video podcasters have demonstrated how inexpensively you can create short-form video for the web, and the networks have established track records, which should make their Internet videos easier to market to advertisers.

If you’re a Windows user, and you need a DVD utility for ripping DVDs for your iPod, Zune, or other media player, check out DVD Catalyst Free.

It’s a free version of a commercial application, but it’s still fairly capable, converting DVD to iPhone, iPod, Zune, PocketPC, Palm, PSP and more devices. It can convert DVDs (movies and TV episodes), as well as all common video file formats (avi, mpeg, divx, xvid, mp4, mkv, flv (YouTube), etc) without the need of any additional software.

Free alternatives include Handbrake and Instant Handbrake.

Free video hosting service Vimeo has announced that it’s banning gaming videos, becuase they’re space hogs that don’t meet the goals of the site:

The Vimeo staff has decided that we are no longer going to allow gaming videos on Vimeo. Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game. Videos falling into this category will be subject to deletion as of September 1st; new videos of this type will be removed.

There are many reasons for the decision, two of which we would like to elaborate on.

1) Vimeo was created with the intent of inspiring creativity and providing a place to share video with friends and family. The Vimeo staff does not feel that videos which are direct captures of video game play truly constitute “creative expression”. Further, such videos may expose Vimeo to liability from the game creator(s), as we have already seen action from popular video game companies against videos such as these.

2) Gaming videos are by nature significantly larger and longer than any other genre on Vimeo. Over these last few months they have been the single biggest reasons for our transcoder wait times.

The decision doesn’t apply to machinima videos.

Are The Wild West Days Of Internet Video Coming To An End?

Vimeo’s decision will seem trivial to some, while it may be huge to others.

The decision is understandable, though. Gaming videos are trivial to produce, can take up huge amounts of space and have limited monetization potential.

At some point, Vimeo and other sites have to figure out ways to make money. One approach will be minimizing their expenses on videos they can’t make money on.

Where will this stop, though?

Some are estimating that 97% of the videos at user-generated video site YouTube are deadweight. If Vimeo, YouTube and other user-generated video sites are going to survive, they’re going to have to make some hard decisions about what content they will let people upload.

The “Wild West” days of Internet video may be numbered.

Embedded Video is a WordPress plug-in designed to streamline embedding video into blogs:

The plugin is made for easily embedding videos into a blog post. The videos can be integrated from external portals (like YouTube, Google Video and many many others) or they can be uploaded to the web server or a remote server and integrated as well. Additionally a corresponding link to the video on the particular video portal page or a download link to the local file can be generated automatically, if demanded. The linktext is also configurable individually. Furthermore a fixed prefix for the linktext can be determined. The videos can be integrated easily by using the built-in WYSIWYG editor. The plugin generates XHTML-valid code and works from WP 2.5.

The following video portals are currently supported:

• YouTube
• Google Video
• dailymotion
• MyVideo
• Clipfish
• Sevenload
• Revver
• Metacafé
• Yahoo! Video
• ifilm
• MySpace Video
• Brightcove
• aniBOOM
• vimeo
• GUBA
• Garage TV
• GameVideos
• vSocial
• Veoh
• Gametrailers

The following file formats for local and remote files are currently supported:

• flv, swf (demands Flash Video Player on web server, see installation instruction)
• mov, qt (demands Quicktime Plugin on client browser)
• wmv, mpg, mpeg, mpe, asf, asx, wax, wmv, wmx, avi (demands a media player plugin (like Windows Media Player) on client browser)