YouTube announced Thursday that it has launched a new landing page to corral all the high-definition video uploaded to the site.

Along with the new page, YouTube’s HD player now launches in a widescreen window that takes up the majority of the browser window. YouTube posted an FAQ on how to how to encode HD videos and how to avoid “windowboxing”–images that are surrounded by black bars.

The video-sharing site quietly rolled out HD-enabled videos earlier this month by adding a “watch in HD” option where the “watch in high quality” option usually appears. Last month, the site began expanding the viewable width of all videos appearing on the site, creating an image like that of with a movie theater screen or high-definition television.

The site is also testing three new landing pages dedicated to the popular categories of news, movies, and music. Each page will be populated with the most popular content on the site related to that category, YouTube explained on a company blog:

The news page will be populated with breaking stories from around the world as well as news drawn from the Google News service; music will feature rising videos alongside playlists dedicated to different genres; movies will showcase some of the most popular short and full-length movies on YouTube today.

Not a rumor: No Steve Jobs keynote at this year’s Macworld — which will be Apple’s last!

This will be Apple’s last appearance at Macworld and chief executive Steve Jobs will not be giving the keynote at the event that is traditionally Apple’s largest of the year.

Instead, on Tuesday January 6, 2009 we will see Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of product marketing, give the keynote. It’s impossible to mention this without re-starting the speculation about Jobs’ health and/or Apple having nothing major to unveil at the show.

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Delta Air Lines plans to begin offering wireless Internet service tomorrow on board half of its shuttle flights between Washington’s Reagan National, New York’s LaGuardia and Boston’s Logan airports.

But don’t get too used to it. By the end of March, the planes that currently fly the Washington-New York route will be replaced with planes operated by contract carrier Shuttle America, which don’t have Internet access.

By then, however, other Delta flights out of Washington will have WiFi. This week marks the first step of Delta’s plan to let passengers on its 330-jet domestic fleet surf the Net by 2009.

The service will allow customers traveling with WiFi-enabled devices such as laptops, smartphones and personal digital assistants access to the Internet, as well as SMS texting and instant messaging services. Voice calls still will not be allowed. The service will be offered for free on local shuttle flights through the end of the year. Next year, it will be $9.95 on flights of three hours or less and $12.95 on longer flights.

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