If you own a Mac, just get a digital video camera with Firewire, and the process for transferring from camera to computer is extremely simple. From there, you can do some basic editing and then upload the file to YouTube.
If you don't have a Mac, you have my sympathy - the process then is anything but simple. You can probably patch something together on a PC by adding a Firewire interface. None of my Linux boxes have Firewire, so I don't know what the challenges there would be.