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YouTube is one of the most popular social sharing sites around. It has been around for a few years, and it has only seen growth in it's years. These days, the focus is on how you can integrate (aggregate) content into other sites, blogs and places.

Adding a YouTube video to your web page or blog:

1. You'll need to edit the HTML of your blog entry or page - this should be relatively straightforward. In Blogger, for example, just click the "Edit HTML" tab.
2. Next, go to the video that you want and look for the 'Embed' box in the "About This Video" section. Copying the HTML code that's there into your website will create an embedded player; the video will play within your site when the user clicks the 'Play' button.
3. You can resize the player by editing the object width = "425" and height = "350" fields at both the beginning and end of the embedded player code. Make sure that the sizes you choose have the same ratio as the default numbers, so that the video doesn't get stretched - just multiply the width by 0.8235 to get the height.

Adding a playlist to my web page or blog:

To show a selection of videos that is easily editable, embed a playlist. When you update the playlist on YouTube, the playlist on your site will update as well. This is a good way of creating longer stories through a series of videos or simply giving your readers more pre-selected content to watch.

1. To create a playlist, go to the My Playlists page, click 'Create a Playlist' and fill out the information.
2. As you find videos you like on YouTube, click 'Add to Playlist' under the player to add them to your list. You can change the order of the videos in your playlist by returning to the 'My Playlist' page.
3. The easiest way to embed a playlist is to create a custom player. Go to your YouTube account and click "Custom Video Players", then "Create Custom Player". Select a colour and format for your player, and then choose what is going to play in it - you can choose a playlist, your own uploaded content or your favourites - and then click the "Generate Code" button.
4. Copy and paste the code into your blog entry or web page, just as you did with the embedded video above.

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