Here's one of the more useful Firefox extensions I've tried out in a while: VideoSurf. (Hat tip to Webware for calling it out, and noting that it originated as a Greasemonkey script.)  You'll find it especially good if you consume a lot of web-based video at sites such as YouTube and Google. In addition to the standard thumbnails to start videos that you get when you search at, say, YouTube, VideoSurf gives you a time-stamped series of chronological thumbnail images from the video. The extracted thumbnails let you jump to any point instantly. Here's how it looks.

Ever wonder how YouTube got started and scaled up to being such a huge repository of video? There are quite a few surprises in the story, as you'll see if you check in on NewTeeVee's post Early YouTube Engineer Tells All. It features video of Cuong Do, an early software engineer at YouTube who is now a manager in the site's engineering group. Open sourcers will be particularly interested in how YouTube employs memcached and Apache along its chain of under-the-hood applications. Check it out.

OStatic's sister site NewTeeVee is out with an interesting report about YouTube expanding its developer tools to give outside web sites and software the ability to video uploads, and more. New APIs will allow interaction and customization outside of YouTube, from the community. According to a YouTube blog post "the number of possible new applications is endless." For example, the University of California at Berkeley will enhance its open source lecture capture and delivery system with the new APIs to provide free educational content. Check out Liz Gannes' report and her update.