Good morning John, and good morning YouTube.

I, from the waist up at least... am dressed quite nicely! And that is because I am here to introduce what I believe to be THE largest YouTube Community-inspired event... EVER.

It's called The Project for Awesome. Very basically, The Project for Awesome is a day in which the YouTube Community takes over YouTube in order to discuss and promote the work of people who are doing things because they believe it is the right thing to do, not because they believe that it is the way that they are gonna make the most amount of money in the world. In English, we generally call that "charity", and so we do our part, one day out of the year, during this lovely holiday season, to promote charity here on YouTube.

And then the day after, we'll go back to singing silly songs, filming your cat doing cute things, and being generally profane, and alienating people's parents, and so on. This year's Project for Awesome I am officially announcing will be taking place December 17, 2008. All of this will be organized onto the Project for Awesome website which is at ProjectForAwesome.com.

So there are two ways to participate in The Project For Awesome. Hopefully you will do both, but maybe you will just do one of the two! First is to make a Project for Awesome video.

The steps for that include... Step One: Make a video about your favorite charity! I could make a video about Toys for Tots!

Or the Nature Conservancy! Or Save Darfur! It doesn't matter.

Make a video as normal, put a little bit in there about your favorite charity and why you think it's a great thing to give to this charity, why you yourself give to this charity, why you hope more people will give to this charity. Two: Make the following image, or a variant of it, your thumbnail for that video. We'll talk a little bit more about that soon.

Three: Make sure your tags and your video name include the words "Project for Awesome" and your charity. Four: Link to your charity's YouTube channel in the sidebar. If they don't have a YouTube channel, then link to their website.

And Five: Submit your video to the Project For Awesome using the "Submit Your Video" link at the top of the ProjectForAwesome.com webpage. The second way to participate is to be a Project for Awesome Supporter! [imitating a member] "I'm a proud member of the Project for Awesome Supporters." And basically all you have to do to be a Project for Awesome Supporter is to sign up for the Project for Awesome mailing list which is on the sidebar of ProjectForAwesome.com. The Project for Awesome mailing list at ProjectForAwesome.com will only be used for The Project for Awesome.

You will never get an email after December 20, I promise! We will never give your email address to anyone else! We will NOT use it as underarm deodorant!

We will NOT sell it to the highest bidder! Throughout the days of The Project for Awesome, The Project for Awesome mailing list will feature certain videos. Those videos will be rated and commented and favorited like CRAZY, so that those videos will hit the big lists, like the Most Discussed list.

And that way more people will see those videos! And then by the end of The Project for Awesome all of the videos on all of the big lists, and a bunch of the videos that are currently being watched on YouTube, and the Most Viewed videos on YouTube will ALL be part of the same project. And you will be able to tell, because they will all have similar titles and similar thumbnails!

And they'll be EVERYWHERE! And everyone will know that YouTube is AWESOME!! We have editable PhotoShop and Fireworks files at the ProjectForAwesome.com so you can change things around and make things unique to yourself, as long as you can tell that it's still a Project for Awesome video.

So basically like, you could do this... Or you could do this... But don't do THIS...

But you could do THIS. And you could do this, or this... but not this. NOT this.

Now before I get into some of the details about how to make your screenshots work, I would like to make a very special announcement. My brother and I, who run this channel together, vlogbrothers, have both decided to put up $1,000 that we will be donating to a Project for Awesome charity because of The Project for Awesome. Because it's not just about talking about charities, it's about GIVING to charities.

We will decide this based not only on the quality of the charity, but on the quality of the video made ABOUT the charity. So make good videos about charities! And maybe YOUR charity will get a thousand dollars from John and Me!

Woo!!! And if anybody else wants to do a similar thing where they award money, we really encourage you to do that! I'm so excited about seeing those screenshots spread throughout all of the world!

Okay, for people who are making Project for Awesome videos, we have to talk a little bit about your thumbnails because there have been some changes to the way that YouTube has decided what's a thumbnail, and what's not the thumbnail. So we've talked with YouTube a little bit, and there are two solutions to this problem. One only works if you are a partner.

If you are NOT a partner, what you need to do is make sure that the middle ten seconds of your video is JUST the image. I HAVE done a lot of research uploading sample videos making sure that this works, and it DOES work. If it's ten seconds long and it's in the middle of the video then YouTube will make it the thumbnail for your video.

So if it's a 3-minute video, it's like the ten seconds from 1:25 to 1:35. And that's all you need to do to get your thumbnail to be Project for Awesome... worthy. Okay I gotta go - bye!