Five years ago YouTube broke the shackles and allowed any artist or videographer to present their skills to the whole world without having to sign up with a studio. It also allowed people to share an immense amount of information in an easy and convenient manner. Not surprisingly, this service caught the attention of many Internet giants, and Google won the race by buying it out and making it ever more popular and accessible.

You're probably wondering, what's in it for the common man who's not an artist? Well, the most important feature of this system is that it allows you free hosting space for all your videos that you'd like to share with people anyway, while at the same time allowing you to display those files on your own blog or website by adding a simple code. Be it an interesting 'How To' video or perhaps your own vacation video, all you have to do is upload it to YouTube, and embed it on your own website or blog. It will work as if it's streaming from your own fileserver. Videos can be uploaded in any popular format such as.MPG,.MOV,.AVI, or.WMV. Once they are uploaded, they are converted into Flash files automatically.

Not only is YouTube the perfect destination for people to upload and share videos, but also a great place to find information. Be it tutorials, movie trailers, independent artists, or anything else, there's a wealth of information available on YouTube that millions of users from all over the world have uploaded on it. To make your job easier, there's even a great list of popular videos that keeps updating on the homepage for you to look at. If there's a particular user whose content interests you the most, you can even subscribe to his videos so you that every time the user uploads any video, you're given an alert.

Lastly, to make things even more personal, you're allowed to add comments to any video and read comments from other uses such as yourself. These comments tell you a lot about the video, and if it's something not worth watching, the comments section can give you an indication. After all, you wouldn't want to waste 5-10 minutes watching something worthless and then search for something else, would you?

Once you register on the site, you can use all its features. Registration is free and isn't really needed if you just wish to view the Youtube Videos. However, you do need to register if you want to make use of other interesting features.

The Author is a professional writer, presently writing for Backup Software and Google Browser http://www.ghacks.net/2009/05/24/portable-google-browser-google-chrome/.