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Guinness World Records has purchased Bragster, a video-sharing site where you can “dare your friends and brag about it.”

On Bragster, users post dares — for example, “I dare everyone to drink five raw eggs” or “I dare everyone to make as many spins in an office chair as possible (in 1 min)” — and other users respond by posting videos of themselves fulfilling the task. Selected winners get bragging rights points and compete in a site-wide leaderboard. Each initial dare also gets voted up or down, so you can weed through the news for the most interesting dares.

There are even levels to be acquired and Xbox Live achievement or Foursquare badge-like medals for top braggers.

The site has been around since 2006. It’s a good match for Guinness, which already allows record-seekers to upload their records to its own website.

Actually, Guinness is in a great position when you think about it. It’s been around for what seems like forever, but its premise — people one-upping each other with bizarre and amazing feats — seems made for the YouTube generation. Guinness will integrate Bragster and its own website to some extent, but it will be kept distinct for a while.

Tags: bragster, guinness world records, News, startups, viral videos

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we would like to give you a gift — the gift of Found Footage Festival, which is possibly the most amusing video site on the web. Why? Because it has tons of badass dating videos from the olden times. Check out our favorites after the jump.

Joe and Nick, the founders of the website and accompanying tour, started FFF after finding a McDonald’s training video in 1991 called “Inside and Outside Custodial Duties.” Ever since, they have been collecting oddball VHS tapes — and only VHS tapes, no YouTube videos — and sharing them with the world.

Every video is (unintentionally) funny, but those that have to do with love and romance take the proverbial cake. So whether you’re dining with your sig other at some fancy joint this Sunday or sitting at home with a bottle of … something, we would like to direct your attention to the following array of hilarity.

David Seeks Goddess

The Video Guide to Successful Seduction

The Art of Meeting a Man

Video Dating

Courtship vs. Dating

Tags: dating, online dating, viral video

If “Pants on the Ground” remixes and burning banana suits aren’t your thing, don’t fret, there’s a whole new reason to use YouTube: movie rentals.

The Google-owned video site debuted online movie rentals today on a very limited basis, allowing users to rent five different flicks from the Sundance Film Festival using their Google Checkout accounts. The company says “a small collection of rental videos from other U.S. partners across different industries, including health and education, will be made available in the weeks ahead.”

Last year, it was reported that YouTube was in talks with movie studios to offer rentals of major motion pictures, creating what would be dubbed an instant Netflix killer. This is far from that, but represents what could become a massively important part of YouTube’s future. Don’t forget — the site is also continuing to push ahead with HD and making its content big screen-friendly.

Slowly, but surely, we expect YouTube to continue in this direction, and other moves like introducing live sports and streaming full-length films offer just a hint of what’s to come from the video site over the next few years. For more on that, see: YouTube Is the Top Social Media Innovation of the Decade.

Tags: trending, video, youtube

A metal-drenched video of a man getting a tattoo of sunglasses on his face has been making the rounds these past few days. Turns out, Matthew — the tatted-out man in question — was hawking Ray-Bans.

Roughly two years ago, Ray-Ban launched a campaign to promote its products via social media. Remember this awesome video: Sunglass Catch?

We’ve seen a lot of attention-grabbing viral campaigns in recent months, and like past semi-racy maneuvers, this one seems to have struck a chord with viewers. The consensus seems to be: This guy is an idiot. Check out some of the comments from the Never Hide video site:

“Good luck getting a job in the future. If you walked into my office I would laugh and send you on your way.”

“This will be hilarious to him for a while, then the regret will set in the first day he wakes up and looks in the mirror and doesn’t laugh.”

“This is how you get your 15 minutes of fame.”

And the official Facebook page:

“I can’t believe someone would be so stupid. Um…did you ever think about getting a job. Good luck working minimum wage stocking shelves in the back of some store at night. Only one you will ever get. Idiot.”

“Just wait til he wants a different frame design.”

“How can somebody be that stupid to ruin his natural face appearance…”

People seem to mighty concerned with Matthew’s ability to find gainful employment.

Although tattoos have become much more common nowadays (hell, The New York Times reported a year ago that they were getting mainstream), and tattoo/advertisements are also nothing new, the choice to get shades etched on his face seems like a questionable life decision on Matthew’s part.

In fact, the whole ordeal leaves us wondering: Just how far is someone willing to go for a taste of being Internet famous? Check out the video, and Matthew’s Flickr stream, for more:

[via Media Bistro, Agency Spy]

Tags: ad, business, humor, money, ray ban, viral video

We already know it’s been a landmark year for Hulu, having just had a peep at its year-end stats. According to NewTeeVee, comScore’s Video Metrix clues us in to another milestone stat coming up for the online video giant: 1 billion video views served monthly.

Hulu finished November with 924 million total views, which represented an eight percent increase from the previous month. Hulu would only need to continue that eight percent growth rate through December to achieve a full billion streams served by the end of this month.

We probably won’t know if the milestone is reached right away, and it may not quite happen in December, but that astonishing growth marker will undoubtedly happen in January even if not by the end of 2009. By comparison, Google (mostly YouTube) was serving 10 billion views per month at the height of the summer, but has fallen back to less than seven billion monthly views in October (although some of that discrepancy is likely accounted for by the comScore vs. Nielson datasets).

By contrast, Hulu has grown steadily and sometimes sharply; it was at only 235 million views a month back in April and climbed to 488 million a month in August. A massive 47 percent increase from September to October saw the online video site climb to 856 million streams per month — and now it’s poised to add another digit to its monthly figure.

Do you get your online video fix from Hulu, and if so, how often?

Tags: hulu, ONLINE VIDEO, stats, streaming, tv

Who doesn’t love carolers? They show up at your door, sing a holiday favorite, and leave, imparting you with Christmas cheer. If caroling is your thing, but you’re not brave enough to bear the winter weather and go door-to-door, YouTube has a rewarding incentive for you to take your tunes to the Web and carol online instead.

YouTube Caroling, a new channel from the video site sponsored by Marshalls and TJ-Maxx, is essentially a caroling contest site where singers can pick one of four songs to sing in the hopes of winning a $100 gift card. If you want to win the $5,000 gift card grand prize, then try your hand at a rendition of “Deck Yourself Out” or “We Wish You a Better Way to Christmas Shop,” two original songs with obvious tie-ins to the channel sponsors.

Should you wish to participate, you can select your ditty, and opt to record your song on site via webcam karaoke-style, or you can download the music and lyrics and upload your rendition after the fact. If you’d rather watch online carolers try their hand at caroling for cash, then you can do that too. In fact, it could prove to be quite an entertaining experience.

You probably won’t be seeing any Mashable editors take the mic to try our hand at the carol contest. For those of you bolder than us, however, we’d love for you to share a link to your YouTube carol submission in the comments. Happy caroling and good luck.

Tags: caroling, christmas carols, youtube

If you’ve looked all around YouTube and can’t find that music video you used to love, there’s a reason it’s missing. The Universal, Sony and EMI music labels have moved their wares to Vevo, a new streaming video site.

We write “new” with a raised eyebrow, as the service utilizes YouTube technology and doesn’t offer all that much actually new. Vevo has a fairly clean interface, though, and is centered around creating save-able playlists. The site also allows for fairly free embedding, as evidenced here:

Find any features that set Vevo apart from YouTube (other than Hulu-style pre-roll ads?). Tell us about them, and any newly-found video picks, in the comments.

If you’re looking for the next Mint.com, you might find it in one of the videos below.

True, there’s a big gap between presenting making a video about a cool idea (which is how these 22 student groups won this year’s Global Innovation Tournament) and building a successful finance startup that gets acquired by Intuit, but hey, you never know …

These winners were selected from around 1,000 participants at high schools and universities around the world. They were all given eight days to come up with a startup idea around the theme of “make money saving fun,” and to present their idea in a short web video. The videos were whittled in several rounds to the 22 winners here, who will be featured on the Global Innovation website. (No, it’s not a big-money contest.) I was part of the final selection committee.

The tournament was organized by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and sponsored by finance software company Intuit. Jan Bosch, the company’s vice president of open innovation, told me that Intuit didn’t choose the money-saving theme, but was pleased to sponsor a contest where the theme was “well-aligned” with the company mission.

“Students really have found elements — not completely new business ideas, but elements — of new innovative thinking that’s beneficial for them as a kind of training and learning perspective,” Bosch said. “And from an ideation perspective, Intuit benefited from getting the different perspective of university students and high school students.”

Here are the winning videos. I’ve embedded them as Apture links, rather than including them directly into the post, so that you don’t have to wait for 22 videos to load — just click on the team name and the video will pop up in a small window. In a few cases, the videos are hosted by Chinese video site YouKu (which doesn’t support embeds, apparently), and the link takes you to the relevant YouKu page.

• “Idea Sharing with Results” award: El Reto del Ahorro, Ecuador
• “The Scream” award: Swipe Warning, China (YouKu link)
• “Fashionable Reminder” award: Reminder Beads, Indonesia
• “Crazy Product” award: DOLLARM, The Determindexta, Singapore
• “Funny Presentation, Serious Business” award: Virtual World, Real Savings, Israel
• “Virtual Reality” award: Social Network Banking, Malaysia
• “I’ll Trade You!” award: Piggy the Barterator, Latvia
• “Provocative But Creative” award: Bikini Incentive to Unplug Electronics, Japan
• “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry” award: Connect Club, Denmark
• “Romantically Competitive” award: Savings Game, China (YouKu link)
• “Irresistible to Watch” award: The Story of a Coin, China (YouKu link)
• “Foot Power” award: Green Cell Phone Charger, Romania
• “Artistic and Cute” award: T-Shirt Recycling, China (YouKu link)
• “Cheap Haute Couture” award: Old Clothes = New Fashion, China (YouKu link)
• “Viral Tips and Oinks” award: Pass the Pig!, United States
• “Motivated Kids” award: Puzzle Bank, Taiwan
• “Pay to Play” award: The Dollar Box, Singapore
• “Freecycle + Savings” award: Shop and Save Facebook Application, Kenya
• “Online Playground” award: Kidsfund, United States
• “Teach them Early” award: Ahorro en Forma Divertida-Fono (board game for lids), Chile
• “Silly, Sweet and Functional” award: Ahorrar es Dar (creative money carriers), Chile
• “Playful Recycling” award: Reciclaman — Desafio (recycling kiosk game), Chile

Open Web Awards Nominations will remain open until 11:59 pm ET on Sunday, November 15th. Submit your nominations here.

The growth of multimedia content continues apace on the web, and 2009 is a year in which we saw Flickr’s 4 billionth photo and YouTube reach an astonishing 1 billion video views per day. The combined number of views for September’s top 10 most watched web series topped 93 million — and that’s just 10 of the thousands of web series from amateur and increasingly professional sources alike.

From dancing babies to fails to Facebook songs, YouTube keeps us entertained. It’s also an agent for social change, a great tool for business, for journalists, and even for the U.S. President.

This year saw the Google-owned video site pass the 120 million viewer mark in the U.S., play a role in documenting the Iran election crisis, and increasingly court professional content from television shows to movies to major label music artists. It’s been working on better monetizing its videos and giving back to video publishers, with revenue sharing and exposure boosts for Promoted Videos. And it shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

In the realm of photos, Flickr still reigns as one of the most popular social destinations for sharing images online. This year it added Twitter integration, launched a great iPhone app, added people tagging and launched a cool new galleries feature. We’re glad to see one of the classic pioneer services that ushered in the age of the social web still growing and innovating. And there’s easily room enough for its deep data and tagging photo storage model alongside popular Twitter photo-sharing site Twitpic’s more quick and on-the-fly approach to image sharing on the web.

The continued growth of web series this year has also been remarkable. From shows like The Guild going into their third season and continuing a major sponsorship deal with Microsoft and Sprint, to amateur DIY phenomenons like Auto-Tune the News debuting to viral popularity, to major media outlets jumping into the game with their own original series, it’s never been a better time to be an online video producer — or audience!

Vote for your favorites

We’d like to know your choices for Best Flickr Photographer, Best YouTube Channel or Personality, Funniest YouTube Channel, YouTube Video of the Year, Best Online Video Web Series, Flickr Photo of the Year, and TwitPic of the Year in this year’s Open Web Awards.

The nominating process is simple, just visit the Open Web Awards site, sign in with Twitter or Facebook, and tell us your favorites. Nominations will remain open until 11:59 PM, ET on Sunday, November 15th.

Some of the leaders in the Photo & Video categories so far are (in no particular order):

Best YouTube Channel or Personality

- MattG124
- Vlogbrothers
- LoraandLayton
- Shane Dawson
- Shaytards
- Charles Trippy
- Sxephil
- Jeff Takeover
- Community Channel
- xxxjoelpolexxx

Funniest YouTube Channel

- Smosh
- LoadingReadyRun
- ShaneDawsonTV
- SHAYTARDS
- Nigahiga
- Friday Night Cranks
- Community Channel
- CardGamesFTW
- Internet Killed Television
- YTwatchdog

YouTube Video of the Year

- Iran, Tehran: wounded girl dying in front of camera, Her name was Neda (Warning: very graphic)
- The Secret of the Sauce
- A Very Potter Musical
- The Guild – Do You Want to Date My Avatar?
- Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)
- The Bag Heads: Quest for the Milk
- Knees Up Mother Brown
- CTFxC: Surprise Marriage Proposal In Spain! (10.4.09 – Day 157)
- Behind the Scenes: Mid-Autumn Romance @ Chelsea Mansion
- Bounce

Best Online Video Web Series

- Internet Killed Television
- Nostalgia Critic
- The Guild
- YTwatchdog
- The Philip DeFranco Show
- SHAYTARDS
- Totally Rad Show
- Angry Video Game Nerd
- The Joker Blogs
- Anyone But Me

Best Flickr Photographer

- Shadi Eideh
- Heychrissmith
- Chanelle Richardson
- Nickpickles
- Mmitchelldaviss
- Stefjosimovska
- Khosey1
- Stuckincustoms
- AHockley
- JaredEarle

Flickr Photo of the Year

- Mesmerized
- Highspeed Water
- The Canine of Rhodes
- One Sad Puppy
- Limitado
- President Barack Obama speaks with a foreign leader in the Oval Office on his first day in office 1/21/09
- Men Repairing Fishing Boat, Zanzibar
- Trent Reznor
- Kevin Pollak challenging Darth Vader to Space Invaders
- Masificación (01) por Rodrigo de Oliveira

TwitPic of the Year

- Plane in the Hudson
- Beautiful little girl in Railton Township, SA
- Social Tattoo
- #cozytweetup
- Pepe. The mouth that swallowed the south
- Go-karting
- RnR Hall of Fame
- Puppets
- at teh cdd reelase parrty *hic*

[Image courtesy of tick followed tock on Flickr]

Tags: flickr, open web awards, owa, Photos, twitpic, video, web series, youtube

Duvet covers offer versatility to your down comforter, and although they’re easily removed for washing, putting them back on can be quite the conundrum. A user at video site Videojug offers a quick and simple trick.

The trick: Turn the duvet cover inside out, hold onto your comforter at the corners, and shake the duvet down over the top. Check out the video up top for a physical demonstration (we dare you to count how many times they say “duvet”).

If you’re not a duvet person, maybe you’d be better served with a quick guide to making crisp hospital corners. What gives you the biggest headache when it comes to making the bed? Sound off in the comments.