6 November 2007 By: Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor YouTube's Official Authorities: The Users! The "YouTube Community Council" officially rolled out We all know that YouTube wants to establish a powerful connection between the company's employees and the users of the service and it often managed to do that through the features of the video sharing technology. But what YouTube is trying to do deserves our applause: the 'YouTube Community Council' is a group of six volunteers which is modified every six months who have the duty to monitor the activity on the video sharing service and report it to the employees every once in a while. Moreover, the six "officials" are invited to the YouTube headquarters to talk straight to the engineers and help them improve certain areas of the product. "Today marks the first day of a new project aimed at better understanding the needs and wants of our users. The "YouTube Community Council" consists of a handful of volunteers (who will rotate every six months) eager to share their opinions about the site and the community with us on a consistent basis," the YouTube team wrote on the main blog. "They're kicking off their tenure by visiting us in San Bruno over the next few days, giving feedback directly to the team that makes it happen behind the scenes. You can approach any of our councilors with your thoughts, gripes --anything at all --over the next six months, and they will fast-track your feedback to us." This is a pretty smart move coming from YouTube and a new evidence that Google's video sharing service tries anything it's possible to bring the users on its side. In the past, some lucky YouTubers had the chance to be hired by the San Bruno-based technology as "Community Advocates". YouTube was acquired by the super search giant Google in October 2006 when the Mountain View company paid $1,65 billion for the technology which had to become the leader of the online video sharing services competition. Page 1 Copyright (c) 2001-2007 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.