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Mike Trang likes to use his iPhone 4 as a GPS device, helping him get around in his job. Now and then, his younger cousins get ahold of it, and play some YouTube videos and games.

In the indictment filed in a New Zealand court earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Department says Kim DotCom oversaw an attempt to copy all of YouTube's videos and tried to inform on rivals.

Rebecca Black's "Friday," a music video we love to hate, tops that list despite temporarily disappearing from YouTube at one point. She's followed by a dog who can't stop thinking about food, a catchy tune by the boys of Lonely Island (with Michael Bolton), some babbling babies, and other gems.

It appears that YouTube is getting a facelift. And Google+ might be a big part of the new look. Tech blog the Next Web was one of several whose staffers caught a glimpse of a redesigned interface on the massively popular video-sharing site.

As his adult daughter took to national television, the career of the Texas judge now infamous for the violent beating he gave her as a teenager began to look less certain Thursday. The State Commission on Judicial Conduct announced that it had opened an investigation into the video, now viewed more than 2.3 million times on YouTube, that shows Aransas County Court-at-Law Judge William Adams beating his then 16-year-old daughter with a belt for using an illegal file-sharing program.

YouTube may get into the business of producing original content. The video giant, owned by Google, is reportedly preparing to announce several partnerships with media companies and personalities to produce content, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft's official YouTube channel was hijacked on Saturday and all videos hosted on it were temporarily removed. The hacker replaced them with others claiming that Microsoft is holding a contest.

The official YouTube channel for children's television series "Sesame Street" was compromised this weekend. At that time, a hacker filled what could be considered one of the more child-friendly corners of the Internet with videos so pornographic that they'd make Cookie Monster blush until he resembled Elmo.

When it comes to spreading popular content around the web, where you post matters. A study that link-shortening service Bit.ly released on its blog Tuesday shows that different kinds of links rise and fizzle at different speeds — depending on the platform they are posted on.

Are social sites like Reddit, Tumblr and YouTube communities that are just as worthy of news coverage as local towns? If so what would a community newspaper covering these disparate and little-understood groups of people look like? A new news site, the Daily Dot, attempts to answer that question.