Video SEO firm EveryZing has launched what it’s referring to as "the Internet’s first cloud-based metadata service" called MediaCloud. As online video plays a bigger role in marketing, lots of businesses are looking for better ways to get their videos found.

January marked the first operational month for video search engine OVGuide as a profit-making entity. Now it has received $5 million in funding from Baroda Ventures.

Last week, Google announced the end of some of its services, and among them was the ability for users to upload videos to Google Video. They said they would be refocusing their attention on building a more comprehensive video search engine, and why not? They’ve already got YouTube.

YouTube has a couple of new things going on worth noting. First off, if you nave not noticed by now, embedded YouTube videos now carry a search box at the top. This only appears when you mouseover the top portion of the video, and disappears when you move away.

Now that we are in December, the final month of the year, I thought it would be fun to go back through our archives and take a look at some of the highlights of different sectors of our industry, and reflect on everything that has happened over the year 2008. January seems so long ago. So much has happened.

Earlier this year, YouTube rolled out YouTube Insight, an analytics program for videos that let users get a look into where and by whom videos were posted. They have launched a new feature of that service today, which allows you to actually pinpoint the specific parts of videos that get viewed the most. A post on the Official Google Blog explains:

Google has started integrating audio indexing or "GAudi" (Google Audio Indexing) into video search. The company hopes to eventually apply it to all YouTube videos, but so far it is only limited to a narrow selection. The experiment began as an iGoogle gadget for political videos, but has now become a Google Labs project, though it is still only being applied to the "Politicians" channel of YouTube.

Word on the street is that video search is about to get a huge upgrade, courtesy of a new site called VideoSurf. Video search has been a tough nut to crack for even the likes of Google, with relevancy problems plaguing pretty much every video search engine around.