Mashable put out a helpful How To yesterday, to make YouTube channels more aesthetically pleasing…

“YouTube recently redesigned channel pages to make them more dynamic and easier to customize. The beta channels are now a hodgepodge of your uploads, favorites, playlists, and numerous in-channel editing options. Should you upgrade to the new design, you have a greater chance of creating an eye-catching channel that’s likely to keep your viewers engaged for longer.

YouTube originally made the redesigned channels available to a select group of elite members and new users. Now however, the video site is letting anyone upgrade their channel, and eventually they’ll be moving all remaining channels over to the new version.

As previously reported, the redesign allows for wider videos and better organized pages; the result is a viewer-friendly experience centered around your content. As such, we wanted to highlight some of the best ways to maximize the redesigned channels and show you how to customize them to your liking.”

To read the full article click here.

Earth Protect – Think of this as the YouTube of environmentalism – a video upload site focused on protecting the earth.

Repower America – Home of Al Gore’s energy plan to “repower” the USA with 100% clean electricity in the next 10 years.

Care2 – Not just focused on the environment, this social empowerment site gives you the tools to petition and take action in whatever issues move you.

Google Power Meter – An iGoogle Gadget that monitors and reports your detailed energy usage and feedback as a way to identify where you can best conserve energy.

YouTube – YouTube features this playlist of video lectures by Stanford experts speaking on energy topics.

Finally, we can’t leave out the ultimate indicator of what’s happening on the web – Twitter.  I leave you with this screenshot of Twitter trending topics from this morning.  It makes me smile to see the online world embrace Earth Day – hope you feel the same way!

30 Ways to Lose a Job on Twitter – http://www.resumebear.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/10/30-ways-to-loose-a-job-on-twitter/

Trailer for Year One (Michael Cera / Jack Black) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTNBwIAY9Zo

Captain is re-captured by pirates – http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-somali-pirates11-2009apr11,0,3373558.story

A Twittering Squirrel – http://twitter.com/common_squirrel

YouTube Loses Lots of Money for Google – http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/03/analysts-estimate-youtubes-losses-at-470-million-this-year

Ever since YouTube’s inception, we have accepted that their videos are going to be low-resolution, pixelated, and often out of proportion within the video player.  For example, when searching for one of my favorite Seinfeld moments, I got this:

It always seemed so bizarre to me that YouTube, the standard for online video, offered it’s videos at such a low quality.  The size and resolution of these videos could be changed when you embedded them – if you knew how to alter the code – but that wasn’t much help to the millions of people who simply wanted to post a quality video on their blog, Facebook page, etc.  Other sites offered higher quality videos for streaming, but none of them came close to the endless selection of content you would find on YouTube.

Lately, it seems as if YouTube has invested quite a bit of time and effort into improving the usability of their videos. Over the past couple of months, YouTube has introduced several great features for their videos that make the user experience much better than in the past.  The first major upgrade they made was the ability to watch videos in a widescreen format.  This is closer to the natural size of most videos uploaded to YouTube, which takes away the distortion that plagued the old format. More recently, YouTube added title and rating to all offsite videos to continue to increase the functionality of embeds.

A far more exciting development for YouTube users has been the integration of high-definition videos.  With the widespread availability of broadband Internet connections, high-definition video can now be streamed across the Internet with little problem.  One way to see HD YouTube videos is to visit the actual video page, click the “Watch in HD” option and witness a huge, crystal-clear, widescreen video.  You also have the option of choosing high-definition when watching an embedded video.  Simply click on HQ (high quality) in the bottom right corner of the video player.  The video automatically converts to a beautiful high-definition version! YouTube high-definition videos look far better than the normal quality versions, and now give people a great, easy option for embedding high quality videos into their blogs, social network pages and sites.

These great new features have made it easier to view and embed great-looking, high quality YouTube videos.  With YouTube continuing to dominate the online video world, they were far overdue in delivering these upgrades to their millions of users.  The result is an excellent video player to view and share great videos with!