And there’s no end in sight to volume of content being produced. Over the last year, video uploads to YouTube have grown 50%. According to the streaming video site, approximately 72 hours of video is uploaded every minute compared to 48 hours of video uploaded each minute just one year ago. To put things in perspective, back in 2007, only six hours of video was uploaded to the site each minute. I wonder how much it costs Google to run YouTube, streaming that much video has to have massive bandwidth costs.

[via Gigaom]

The game lets players determine Don Draper’s actions as he seeks to solve his problems. There are three possible endings, which can be explored by the order of the tasks that he needs to complete. After viewing a short animation, players will be given a choice of actions that brings them forward in the story.

It’s a pretty cool way to prepare for the debut of the fifth season of Mad Men, which will start tonight (3/25) on AMC.

[YouTube via designboom]

To achieve the effect, Thecnocrat glued one LED each into eight ping pong balls, hooked the setup to an Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller board and wrote a code to recreate the light trail effect. He attached the whole thing to a black shirt with a YouTube logo and he was ready to load.

A lot of Hack A Day commenters are saying that the use of Arduino is overkill in this case and offered several simpler solutions. I only understood the ones that didn’t involve electronics. Still, it’s a free world. If a Vimeo user wants to be a YouTube window, I say let him.

[via Hack A Day]

Sad, isn’t it? I mean, I have nothing against social networks. In fact, I think they could actually be helpful and useful in many cases. But sometimes, there are those who put too much of their worth or their life into these sites, that they’re driven to do really crazy stuff in some extreme situations.

Just a few days ago, a couple from Tennessee were murdered because they “unfriended” a woman named Jenelle Potter. In a fit, her father and some other guy went to the couple’s home and shot them in the head. Their 8-month old baby was found unharmed in the mother’s arms. Maybe there was more to this than just the Facebook unfriending, but as things stand right now, the whole thing sounds pretty sick.

Image credit: DarkDelaqroux

There’s also this video on YouTube that’s gone viral the past few days. It’s from an IT pro named Tommy Jordan who talks about Facebook parenting. In the clip, he shoots his daughter’s laptop because she posted “disrespectful status updates.” There’s some NSFW language in the video, so be aware before hitting play.

Maybe the video was just made to drive traffic, but it kind of makes you think: what’s happening to society? It’s not that the daughter’s status updates were appropriate by any means, but it’s a bit of a hyperbolic response to her behavior. Why not just take her laptop away – or donate it to charity?

I really don’t think that anything that happens on Facebook is worth taking someone else’s life – or shooting a laptop, for that matter.

Got 24 hours to spare? Here:

As if that wasn’t absurd enough, crysknife007 also made an HD version. It’s only one and a half hours long, but come on.

Thankfully, he also uploaded an audio (.ogg) file of the 24-hour loop. Warp to Mediafire for the free download.

[via io9]

It’s estimated that 42.6 billion videos were viewed online in the U.S. in October, with 20.9 billion served up by Google’s video juggernaut. VEVO took second place with 827 million, and Hulu came in third with 791 million.

What about unique viewers who watched videos? You might expect Facebook to be the big winner, but no. Again YouTube took the lead, beating Facebook by triple with 161 million unique views, versus 59.8 million on Facebook. And the average amount of video viewed per person was a staggering 7 hours. Remember these stats are just for the U.S. The company’s overall stats are much higher.

[via Search Engine Land via geek]

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The uWave was created by a team of University of Pennsylvania students who were competing in the PennApps hackathon. The team used a tablet computer and some clever coding in order to get it to match the cooking time with YouTube videos. If that’s not enough, the uWave also sends you a text message when your food is done, and Tweets that you’ve used it too.

So, now humans will never be without a cat video or a text message, even when nuking a bag of popcorn. Humanity marches on… Then walks straight into a pole because they were too busy entertaining themselves.

[via Hack A Day via Thatsnerdalicious]

One person who isn’t lacking in any of these is David Calvo.

David is currently the Guinness World Record holder for solving the most Rubik’s Cubes in one hour (which was 185 cubes, in case you were wondering.) David’s latest feat still involves the Rubik’s Cubes, although it’s way more cooler than just sitting down and cracking through them as quickly as possible, because he’s actually juggling two cubes while solving a third one with just his left hand.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Pretty neat, eh?

[via Reddit]

The brainchild of director Brian Curtin, the video was shot over the course of 2 years by a small team of friends, and was clearly a labor of love for the team. The short film centers around a band of resistance fighters led by Adrian Shephard and their fight to warn civilization about the invasion that awaits them. But enough of my yakkin’. Sit back, dim the lights, dial up the video to HD, go full screen, and watch.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Wow. Wasn’t that great? Even the VALVE guys favorited it on YouTube.

Now the best part. The whole thing was created with a budget of just $1200 bucks, and was shot on a Canon HV20 camera, which costs about the same amount. If only Hollywood could pull off this kind of entertainment on that sort of a shoestring budget. Give these guys a couple of million bucks and see what they could do if given the means.

So without further ado, I give you, Inceptionauts…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

So do you think that Raz or Cobb is a better at manipulating the subconscious?

[via Game Informer]

These great fake vintage posters were created by Rodolfo Sampaio and Marco Martins of Brazil’s Moma Propaganda agency for something called the MaxiMidia Seminars.

[Ads of the World via Ufunk]

Recommended by Kotaku commenter SirBrau, SC2NoobSchool is a YouTube channel for those interested in becoming competitive StarCraftII players. It’s free, you can study anytime you like, there’s no exams and the teacher, 22-year old Trebis, looks like Justin Long with a beard. What more can you ask for? Here’s a sample of what you can learn from Bearded Justin Long:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Losing a lot is an inescapable part of being a newbie, same as any game, but if you really want to be a competitive player, having resources like this doesn’t hurt. Enroll at SC2NoobSchool and learn up, son!

This super-8 fan film was made by Rob Hampton and his friends in Cape Cod in 1978. The voices were added 25 years later by some of the original cast. I find the cheap special effects endearing – and at times better than the actual TV show.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via Coudal]

Don’t believe it? Watch this video. Or better yet, play Snake on the video while Snake is being played in the video. That’s double proof.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

One more thing: I’ve verified that the trick works even if the video isn’t filed under ‘Gaming’. You can try it out on this video. And no, it doesn’t seem to work with embedded videos.

Again, just click on the video once to “activate it”, then tap or hold the Left arrow key. I can’t believe we haven’t heard about this before even though it’s that simple to unlock – heck, the Left arrow key is the rewind button for YouTube clips.

[via Kotaku]

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Please make it stop. Now.

[New York Times via Make:]

Now, thanks to the ingenuity of one Robert Oschler, you’ll soon be able to control the YouTube Leanback experience from the comfort of your easy chair. Robert has managed to put together an application which allows him to use his Wii-mote control and Bluetooth on your PC to allow him to control Leanback wirelessly. Here’s a short video clip showing off his WiiLeanback app in action…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The cool thing is that Robert plans on releasing WiiLeanback as a downloadable app in “a week or two”, so you’ll be able to do this for yourself without much more than a few keystrokes – which I’m guessing is something you’ll really like, assuming you’re too lazy to get up from the couch to flip to the next video.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

George Lucas would be so proud.

[via Mister Honk via Nerdcore]

By tracking which links to video sites are most popular over time, bitly.tv lets you quickly see the most popular videos on the web – right now, or at any point over the last week. It’s a great way to discover new content, and just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what these guys will be able to do with all the data they collect on the popularity of links that are clicked on.

At this point bitly.tv is just an experiment under the labs.bit.ly site, but we’re hoping it sticks around for a long time. Check out bitly.tv, and I’m sure you’ll be hooked. I sure am.

[via NOTCOT]

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I couldn’t figure out all of the video game references in the clip, but I definitely caught Pong, Tetris and Pac-Man in there.

I’m guessing it took quite a bit of time to pull this off, given the sheer number of frames and constant lighting and relighting of candles – never mind all the times he probably burnt his fingers between frames.

That’s Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube. Behind him are elephants. Aaaand that’s about it. Not a promising first, but a first nonetheless.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

Elephants are cool because of their long trunks. Enlightening stuff. Was he stoned when they filmed that? Probably just nervous. But if you think about it, a lot of YouTube videos are still essentially like that – pointless and time-wasting. But we’ll keep on coming back, because hey, what else are we going to do at the office?

[via Gearfuse]