It took emergency officials over five hours to figure out that the mysterious gas leaking from a container at Mumbai Port Trust early on Wednesday was chlorine. But they had had no training on tackling the leak. So they did the next best thing they could: they Googled “how to manage chlorine leak”.

The search threw up links to several documents and the officials — working out of Lal Bahadur Shastri College of Advanced Maritime Studies and Research, just across the wall from the chlorine containers — began poring over them, sources told The Indian Express.

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YouTube is known for its viral video abundance, but the only source of income for popular video creators came from advertising.

Until now. The King of video is going to give away $5 million dollars in grants.

They're rewarding popular YouTube partners with cold hard cash, ranging from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand dollars.

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The user-generated experimental project kicks off on July 24, 2010—this day will become the ‘key character’ of the spots and the film itself. The users are encouraged to tell the world how they live, bring their personal attitude to what’s going on around them.

And try to be as open and imaginative as possible. The amateur filmmakers are asked to keep from shooting trademarks, clips, movies, etc. to avoid product placement—this being the only restriction. The works are to be uploaded between July 24 and July 31 to the Life in a Day channel on YouTube.

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Israeli soldiers who marched to a Ke$ha tune may have to get off the dance floor. Six gun-toting soldiers who break into a rehearsed dance number while patrolling a West Bank street in a lighthearted video posted on YouTube are facing possible disciplinary action.

The brief clip, which appeared online this weekend, shows a half-dozen Israeli Defense Force soldiers from the Hod platoon of the 50th battalion walking down a street in Hebron, according to Israel's Haaretz.com. As they reach the center of the street, the military men stop and kneel. A few moments later, Ke$ha's "Tik Tok" begins to play, and the soldiers break out in a coordinated dance.

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Google has rushed to fix a weakness at YouTube that allowed hackers to add inauthentic pop-up messages as well as redirect users to other websites. Code added in the comments of YouTube videos would be triggered when people watched the video. One notable example was of a pop-up message informing the reader that Justin Bieber, a Canadian singer, had been killed in a car accident – something that was wholly untrue. YouTube’s owner, Google, said that the issue was resolved within two hours.Google is continuing to check YouTube’s vulnerabilities to ensure there are no further weaknesses that could be exposed.

The battle between HTML5 and Adobe Flash for dominance over video on the Web is likely to end poorly for one of the two, and lately it’s been looking worse and worse for Flash. But today, Google-owned video site YouTube has come out with a list of its own reasons why Flash is here to stay - for now - and HTML5 simply isn’t qualified to handle the job at hand.

Overall, YouTube software engineer John Harding’s argument comes down to one simple statement: “We need to do more than just point the browser at a video file like the image tag does - there’s a lot more to it than just retrieving and displaying a video.”

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Is this a titanic battle for the future of the moving image? The very fabric of the how video is delivered is apparently up for grabs, with the struggle to decide the future framework for its delivery, increasingly obvious and palpable.

Perhaps the biggest name in online video, YouTube, recently weighed into this arena with some opinions of its own. YouTube is owned by Google so its opinions cannot be viewed as entirely politically  neutral, but either way.

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Three Wiltshire hoodies have been arrested and bailed after taking a double-decker bus for an early morning jaunt, part of which popped up on YouTube. Two 16-year-old girls and a 21-year-old man swiped the vehicle from a depot in Amesbury in the early hours of 18 June and headed off down the A345 towards Salisbury. In the process, they hit a tree before "smashing to a halt into parked cars on an Amesbury estate", as the Telegraph puts it. According to cops, the trio "caused around £30,000 damage, including to a green Volkswagen Polo, a silver Honda Jazz and three other £200,000 buses at the depot".

Inspector Martyn Sweett said: "It was utter stupidity, extremely reckless and they are rather fortunate that, because of the time of day that they took the bus, that they didn't kill anyone in the road. "To drive a bus like that takes a considerable amount of training. You have individuals who are completely untrained and they are driving round this huge bit of equipment on the roads."

After years of refusing advertising from online casinos and gambling operators, YouTube has begun publishing ads in the UK related to gaming. Ladbrokes has been accorded the privilege to be the first Internet gambling company to have an ad featured, but YouTube executives say businesses licensed for gaming in Italy, Spain, and France, as well as the UK, will be permitted to purchase ad space.

YouTube history is to turn down ads related to gambling, but the company was acquired by Google in 2006. Google was forced to stop publishing casino advertising in the US after a settlement with the US Department of Justice, but the search engine company has allowed UK ads to contain gaming material.

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With broadband speeds rising worldwide, plenty of people have the network connection to watch HD videos online without too much trouble. YouTube, like most other video sites, has been streaming HD videos for quite a while, but there’s always been an annoying issue, most of the times, the videos start streaming in the lowest quality available. This is annoying enough for individual videos, but, for playlists, it completely ruins the experience.

Thankfully, YouTube is finally showing signs that it’s doing something about it, at least partially, with the introduction of a new “Settings” button inside the new player, which helps you define your default playback settings. YouTube has always had a Video Playback Quality page, but it’s now making it more visible and accessible.

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