2009’s crop of top viral video advertisements show us that people are willing to embrace a host of creative approaches on the social video Web, from beguiling mini-films, to user-generated advocacy, to YouTube (YouTube) celebrity endorsers, to elaborate commercial-grade productions. That’s good news for creators.

As such, YouTube has a blog post today admitting that maybe its 5-star rating system not only isn’t the best way to vote on videos, but is essentially useless.

Let's say you are a B2B company that sells to marketers and small businesses and want to attract new prospects to your website, as well as spread your thought leadership message about inbound marketing.What do you do? Lots of things. You blog, make videos, podcast, do webinars, write ebooks, be active in social media and just generally leverage inbound marketing. As part of this, you can also try to create a viral video on YouTube.

Today YouTube releases the Call-to-Action Overlay, a semi-transparent pop-up that enables advertisers to link viewers to any site they wish. For example, a company supporting a charity can send users watching a certain video to their charity subsite.

David Meerman Scott said, "Barack Obama is the most successful 'new marketer' in history." Arun Chaudhary, New Media Road Director for Obama for America, reveals best practices for producing quality video for the Internet and meeting a high demand for immediate access to video footage of events. Adding Creative Commons License to this footage triggered what Meerman calls a "world wide rave"; citizens shared, remixed and reused commercially, "delivering information online as a primary tool."