Nicholas here, fresh off freaking out over Shogun Rua’s loss last night. (I hate to use the word “robbed,” but Mr. Rua was 100 percent robbed last night. Later today: watching Dream 12!) I just wanted to draw your attention to a New York Times essay I just stumbled upon. It’s about the Internet, and our increased dependence upon it. It’s pretty short, so it won’t kill you to read the whole thing.

Supposedly, the The Pirate Bay guys were found guilty in their recent trial in Sweden, and, supposedly, they got sentenced to a year in prison and had to pay $4.5 million in damages.

But back in the parallel universe which happens to be the real world, they’ve appealed the verdict and could probably keep doing so for the next few years. So in the meantime they need to keep busy, and what better way to do this than start a new user driven video portal to take on YouTube, called, predictably, Video Bay, allowing users to post and share video clips without having to worry about copyright violations. Seems reasonable. It’s not like they need to attract any more legal interest or anything.

If there was any question about the significance of the iPhone 3GS’s impressive video functionality, here’s your answer: YouTube reports that in the six days since the iPhone 3GS was released last week, the number of mobile uploads has increased by a whopping 400%. For a single phone model to have such a major impact on the site is simply phenomenal.

Even without the iPhone, YouTube is seeing major growth across the entire mobile space — the site has seen uploads go up 1700% over the last six months. It’s not hard to guess why. Video-enabled smartphones are becoming increasingly popular, as are high speed data connections. YouTube also attributes part of the growth to a streamlined upload flow (note how easy it is to upload a video from your iPhone to the site), as well as its improved sharing capabilities (you can now syndicate your videos to services like Facebook and Twitter).

It’s been about a month since I subscribed to Optimum Online Ultra, the fastest Internet service in the country—sorry, Peter. Consider this a predictable, rubbish explanation of how my Internet habits—nay, my life!—have changed as a result of having a 101 megabits-down/15 megabits-up connection.

Well, it finally happened: someone used YouTube to help deliver a baby. Yup, a man in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Cornwall, to be exact) used to video-sharing site to help deliver his wife’s fourth child, a boy named Gabriel. (A nice, biblical name!) Yes, this is a crazy world we live in.

Will the Internet run out of bandwidth? That’s the concern expressed by an upcoming study, and it could mean the end of the Internet as we know it. Uselessly slow Web sites (think: YouTube, Hulu), Internet “brownouts” (“please wait: processing request”), and general mayhem could be the norm in just a few years’ time. So let’s freak out about it.

Yesterday’s revelation that China blocks access to YouTube should not have come as any surprise, but did you know that other countries censor the Internet in their own special ways? (Happy families are all alike!) For example, did you know that India’s Computer Emergency Response Team’s has the power to block Web sites wily nilly? Ostensibly it was set up to help eliminate terrorist-realted sites, but it has also blocked “Hindu nationalists and other radical groups on social networking sites such as Orkut.” Or, that in Argentina a search for “diego maradona” will be tampered with because of a terrible court ruling

The Illuminati are real, and have removed that proto-iPhone auction from eBay. The auction had been live for a few days before Apple contacted eBay, shutting the auction down before the proto-iPhone made it “out there.” The video was also pulled from YouTube.

Cute kid talking about computers. Enough said.

Can’t get enough of British Royalty for some reason? So much so that you’d not only visit their Web site, on the Internet, but you’d sift through old photos of the Queen of the Realm, through the years? Consider yourself the luckiest person(s) alive, for the Royal Family (is that a proper noun?) has re-launched its Internet Web site presence. YouTube videos, Google Maps integration, the works!

How much time do you spend online, America? [Waits for answer.] That’s funny because the average teenager spends a cool 31 hours per week online. And what does the average teen do? The usual, I guess you can say—instant message friends, surf YouTube, get homework help, view porn, etc. Just another day in Anytown, USA.

Any Papists in the house? Hooray for everything, then, as the Vatican has just launched its own dedicated YouTube channel. Now you can watch Pope Benedict XVI, in all his heavenly splendor, demand that y’all leave Steve Jobs alone. Something like that.

Youtube has officially enabled High Quality in embedded videos. The new embedded player sports a little HQ button, which is strangely absent from Youtube’s on-site player.

One can only assume that they decided they were ready for the blast of traffic that will certainly result from the huge amount of embedded high-quality videos to come. Doubtless the stream pipe has to be a lot fatter for the HQ videos, but advances in compression efficacy have ensured that doubling the image quality doesn’t double the size of the video.

Wrap your head around this one: you can play Street Fighter on YouTube. Some hard-working guy named Patrick Boivin put together a series of stop-motion Street Fighter action sequences uploaded as separate videos, all triggered by clicking various attack button hyperlinks. It’s hard to explain but it makes sense once you start playing.

VUDU sent along a minor update that adds a little YouTube goodness to the Netflix-streaming machine. Now, if a high definition version is available, the VUDU box will display that rather than the crappy SD version. You, the user, do not have to do anything extra; well, just update your movie streaming box. That’s all. You listening, TiVo. Where is your HD YouTube update? Eh?

YouTube is chock full of amateur videos. It’s easy to make a video and upload it to YouTube. Making a quality soundtrack for your video is considerably more difficult, though, which is why many folks punt and just use a song from their favorite artist. Don’t be surprised, though, if your recent uploads are silent.

LG will be unveiling its new line of Blu-ray players at CES next week, but has announced today that its upcoming network-enabled models will feature Netflix streaming (already available on current models) along with additional streaming content from CinemaNow and YouTube.