Have you been on YouTube yet today? The statistics say that chances are, you have. While on the site, did you happen to notice any changes? It's small enough that you might miss it, but it represents a pretty big change in how the site promotes videos. YouTube is now more prominently featuring "popular" videos instead of those that are only the "most viewed".

So what's the difference? Aren't the most viewed videos the popular ones? The terms seem almost interchangeable. YouTube created the "popular" category back in December. The difference lies in how it tallies the information it uses to make those calls. While "most viewed" was a simplistic ranking system, just keeping track of how many people start playing each clip, "popular" apparently uses a more sophisticated algorithm, taking into account the quality of each viewing. If you close a clip a second or two after starting it, it won't count towards establishing the clip as popular. If instead, you watch the whole thing several times and then forward it to a friend, the clip is more likely to be rated popular.

The big win for users is that this should help cut down on people trying to push their videos onto the front page by spamming the site with views. Since it now takes quality views to increase a clip's popularity, the system is much more difficult to take advantage of. This means that the front page clips are actually more likely to be entertaining. Sound good to us!

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