To enable collaborative annotations:

1. Go to your annotations editor in My Videos or on your video’s watch page

2. Retrieve the special annotations link

3. Send the link to your friends

4. One they click the link, they will be allowed to add annotations to you video

5. You can delete them if you don’t like what they added

You can disable access to the annotations URL if you wish, when you don’t want people to add anymore. You can also edit or delete anything you wrote on other people’s videos.

Of course if you’re like me (or the woman below), you normally don’t care about annotations anyway and feel they just add clutter to the videos. For us, YouTube has added a setting to disable annotations.

You can turn them off on individual videos by clicking the menu button or on all videos by going to your account page, clicking Playback setup, then clicking annotations and un-checking the box marked show annotations. Save your changes obviously.

YouTube Video Annotations let users add text within their own videos. Kind of like VH1′s Pop-up Video. Users can use the feature to add background information, create stories, link to related content, etc.

In the past, users have had to use a somewhat complicated editor to add annotations (the editor is still available for those who prefer it). Now all they have to do is simply:

1. Login to YouTube

3. click on the video to start adding annotations

This is a great way to make YouTube more usable for a wider range of people, but Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web does bring up a pretty good point. "Too often, users already overuse the annotations to advertise some of their other videos or to remind us that the video is also available in HD (a note that also pops up when you are already watching the video in HD, by the way)."

Between the annotations and the pop-up ads YouTube has been putting in videos, it can get a bit annoying to the viewer who is used to watching clean, uninterrupted videos on the site. Lardinois does note that a help page shows how to turn annotations off for embedded videos.

YouTube emphasizes the ease of linking with the new set-up. "We are also making it easier for your annotations to link to a variety of different YouTube pages. You’ll be able to link to another video, channel page, playlist, group or search query," says a post from the YouTube Team. "What’s more, you’ll even be able to link to a video response page or message window to prompt for feedback from your audience."

Annotations with links do give users the opportunity to make more interactive videos, and from a marketing perspective, this can certainly be an interesting point. Still, I don’t think anyone wants to see YouTube turn into a big pit of video ads.

With YouTube’s Video Annotations, you can:

• Add background information about the video.
• Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)
• Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
• All of the above!

The annotations don’t appear to let you link to non-YouTube content–which would be awesome for companies hoping to direct visitors back to their website–and they also don’t appear in embedded versions of video.

If you want to see the annotations in action, watch this magic card trick video.

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