This blog post from Matt Cutts is a couple weeks old but I still wanted to mention it here so I’d have it filed away in my brain. YouTube has a way for you to link to the exact minute
and second within a video by messing with the URL a bit.

Take for example the YouTube video of Beaker from the Muppets singing Habanera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDFgtFXfnv0 . Of course you can view and enjoy every second of that video, but if you want to go to a particular minute/second just add to the URL in this format:

#t=xxmxxs

Where xx is a minute and second number, of course.

So if you wanted to capture Beaker just as he’s about to hit his massive high note, your URL would look like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDFgtFXfnv0#t=01m09s

There are a couple of disadvantages to getting to YouTube videos this way. If you’re looking at a fairly large video getting to a spot later on might take a few seconds to load. And I noticed when I wanted to go backwards on the Beaker video that too took a little while for YouTube to load up.

On the other hand, I can see this as a potentially really fun browser gadget. Have an extension that randomly generates an anchor tag between 10 and 30 seconds and applies it to all the videos that you browse through YouTube. It would be like flipping through TV channels.