YouTube has bundled a new set of tools into its video authoring system that gives you the ability to hack a small degree of interactivity into your videos. The additions won't be interactive in the style of a traditional Flash game or application, which let you do whatever you'd like within a single content window, but they will give you the power to do more with YouTube than you ever thought possible. And in our case, it helped us create a choose-your-own-adventure guide for .

You'll want to come into your YouTube interactive video experience with a game plan. Resist the urge to film your movie off-the-cuff as you do any other YouTube video; treat the project too casually, and you'll be creating extra work for yourself in the long run. Your interactive video can take many forms, but our directions assume that you'll be creating a "click here to do something" kind of movie.

Creating an outline for your interactive movie is the surest way to avoid unnecessary work. Think of the plan for your film as a giant flowchart: Clip A can lead to any number of outcomes--B, C, or D, for example. Regardless of how you decide to organize your video, make sure that you've given yourself the ability to reuse as many clips as possible in your interactive chain.

Although our video is interactive in that it allows users to select their path through the overall narrative, we're still guiding the way using a single batch of videos. The power of YouTube's annotation function is that it allows you to create various pathways through the same batch of videos--basically reusing what you've shot in a bunch of different combinations.