Check out The Gregory Brothers', of “Auto-Tune the News” fame, "Bed Intruder" video. The video currently has over 10 million views and the song is currently on the Billboard 100.

It's the first time, to my knowledge, a viral video has been propelled into Billboard standings. Now that's some social power.

As reported in Wired's Epicenter, Universal Music Group (UMG) and MTV were unable to reach an agreement about displaying online videos. In response, UMG pulled all of it's videos from MTV.com and both sides have released statements blaming the other.

UMG has created Vevo, a new online video warehouse, in an effort to control and promote their artists, and speculation is that they wanted the same control on MTV.com.

What will this mean for the future of online music videos? Will others follow suit and create their own video platforms in an effort to monopolize their artists' content? Will artists make separate deals with brands like MTV.com for fear of losing exposure to those audiences?

Coke Europe is using short, stylized films and other niche content to introduce Burn to its target audience of young hipsters. From winged competitors like Red Bull to fleet-footed fighters like Converse to 10,000-lb. heavyweights like Dell, big brands have been wielding microgenres in the battle for the attention of tastemakers for years. And the success of tactfully branded collaborations like The Creators Project suggests that the approach may be working.

Now, whether people actually share the content socially or not is another matter. Here, success seems to rely on two main variables: entertainment value and the credibility factor. In other words, influencers are always among the first to show fresh stuff to their following. If a piece of content is too heavily branded, that implies a lack of freshness. Makes sense, right?

Certainly there are plenty of exceptions to this rule (Nike, Adidas, et al.). But one way to help influencers them keep their cred intact is to burn most of the evidence of your brand within your niche content.

YouTube announced the release of a new embed code that supports HTML5 on its blog . They continue to embrace HTML5 and remark about the added mobile compatibility it offers.

An additional benefit of the new embed style is that it will eventually allow embeds to work on mobile devices, which typically use a built-in player instead of Flash or HTML5.

Before we make this new embed code the standard for our general users, we wanted to give our developer community a preview. While there may be some limitations, please try it out and let us know how it went.

Tammy Camp shows us the state of online video. Video uploaders are a small (relatively speaking) but growing group and the seem to be shifting away from true video sites, like YouTube, and toward using social media sites to house their videos.

No matter how they're using the technology online, it seems people are using video in the same old ways: home movies and documenting their travels.

Back in the day, artists were anti-social (i.e. Matt Saracen's mentor in this season's Friday Night Lights). Then along came Saatchi. Now we have Work of Art. And that, friends, is the either the decline or the rebirth of contemporary art in a nutshell (depends on who you talk to, really).

With YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video, Guggenheim is betting it's the latter. And best believe that with the reputations of curators like Nancy Spector on the line, the stakes are high. Will crowdsourcing be kinder to the Gugg than Vegas was? We'll find out on 10/21. Save the date.

Hot(ish) off the presses from Mashable comes a report from TubeMogul announcing Twitter as the soon-to-be top referrer for web video traffic. Not only that, but users are engaged for over two minutes on average. Definitely something to be said for the crowd mentality. 

I've got to admit, I was surprised to learn of the big second place numbers Yahoo! is putting up. A close second, likely hanging in there via email and homepage content streamed daily.

It's easy to forget how heavily we rely on YouTube in our daily lives. Then a video comes along and puts everything in perspective.

The YouTube Five Year Channel is a collection of testimonials from the people who create those videos. The stories shared by Mehdi Saharkhiz and other active contributors serve as reminders that, for better or worse, we all belong to the YouTube community.

Ricky Gervais was recently interviewed by Big Think. Besides some good laughs, he talks about some of the social media aspects of his career thus far. Gervais, who is the current world record holder for most downloaded podcast, gives a couple of pointers, which essential break down to: be casual, be open and have fun. Good advice for all your social media efforts.

YouTube has announced that they'll give sites that send them a lot of traffic a little love back, in the form of a link back. Something that has been common practice for bloggers since day one is starting to be practiced by larger and larger companies.