How often do you see people embedding a YouTube video and including a comment like, “Yeah just fast forward to 3 minutes and 27 seconds in and you’ll see….”? Well I just learned, courtesy of Matt Cutts, that it is possible to link to a specific point in a YouTube video by adding a few simple characters after the URL.

Matt illustrated this by linking to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Twitter comment today:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s

As you can see, that links to 31 minutes and 8 seconds into the video. Pretty neat, right? But you don’t want to LINK to YouTube videos on your websites, chances are you want to EMBED them. So, can you embed a YouTube video that will start playing at a specific point in the video? Our test is below:

I tried appending the neccessary code:

#t=31m08s

At different places in the embed code to make it work, but alas, it wouldn’t. While Matt’s deep linking to specific parts of YouTube videos is pretty awesome if you’re on a forum, AIMing, emailing, explaining, etc… it’s an awesome little trick. However, I’d LOVE to see this integrated with embedding and unless I’m mistaken (feel free to correct me) that isn’t currently possible.

In any case, I love learning little tips like this. It’s like once you know them you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them! This also applies to keyboard shortcuts in a BIG way.