Several weeks ago I re-tweeted Mashable.com's "12 Fun Hacks for Getting More out of YouTube."  Today I learned about EmbedPlus,  a web/flash based tool that lets you do many of the things listed in that article in one easy location.

Simply copy and paste a YouTube URL and then choose start and end points if you want.  You can create your own sub-chapters within the video and also add your own annotations.  Once finished you can embed the updated video to any site (or generate a unique link).  The EmbedPlus player has a few extra features such as zooming, quick replay, chapter navigation (if you created sub-chapters) and related comments (from Twitter and YouTube).

Here's a quick video I made of WIlco's Nels Cline playing a guitar solo.

This would be a great tool for students and teachers because it is so easy to use and to add annotations.  A teacher can assign kids to watch a video on YouTube and to create their own annotations and to highlight scenes that they find interesting. When adding sub-chapters and comments, the video is available in view for pausing and rewinding making it almost feel like a video-editing program. 
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I've been helping my wife (@LivingLuxe4Less) customize the look of her new blog, www.LivingLuxeForLess.com. Most free website and blog hosts (e.g. Blogger, WordPress, Weebly) have an option to edit the HTML code of a page or element.  You don't need to be a web designer or programmer in order to use the HTML to make the page look exactly how you want.  All you need to know is how to copy and paste.
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For this site, which was created in Weebly, we added a couple of HTML elements: a Twitter status widget, an interactive image from Polyvore, and an email sign-up via  Feedburner. First, we had to generate the code for the element in each respective site.  We first went to Twitter's  Goodies section, and followed their easy steps to generate the Twitter status widget. With a few easy clicks, a bunch of code was generated.  We copied it, went to the Weebly interface and selected a "custom HTML" element.  Here we were allowed to paste in the code, and as soon as we saved the element the widget automatically appeared.

The code can look overwhelming but the truth is you don't really have to worry about what it means.  Once you get the hang of embedding html into your website or blog, you'll start to notice that embed html options are available on a ton of websites and services. 
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