YouTube Spotlight: A highlight reel of our digital lives

By Deborah Netburn

June 29, 2012, 9:30 p.m.

It's worth keeping a close eye on trendingYouTube videos. The video sharing site has become our culture's highlight reel and dumping ground.

You've heard the insane numbers: Seventy-two hours of YouTube are uploaded every minute. More than 3 billion hours of YouTube video are watched every month. And last year, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views -- about 140 views for every person on Earth.

That's a lot of video.

So how can you sort through it all and find the best that YouTube has to offer?

Allow us to help. Each week we'll reach out to YouTube Trends manager Kevin Allocca, the guy whose job it is to make sense of what is hitting and why.

He'll help us find three awesome, intriguing, weird trending videos, and we'll share them with you.

Sound like a deal?

This week we look at incredible domino art, why you should consider spiral-cutting your hot dog, and the latest parody of Gotye's "Someone That I Used to Know."

View the story "Starry Night in dominoes, how to spiral cut your wiener" on StorifyStarry Night in dominoes, how to spiral cut your wienerStorified by · Fri, Jun 29 2012 21:28:40Starry Night - Vincent van DominoghflippycatStarry Night - Vincent van Dominogh

Domino artist FlippyCat's latest work is a re-creation of Vincent van Gogh's “Starry Night,” constructed out of 7,067 painstakingly arranged dominoes. According to FlippyCat, it took 11 hours to build this piece the second time around, and the first attempt failed when a screw from the camera rig fell in the middle of it. The perils of being a domino artist!

FlippyCat uploaded this video to YouTube one week ago and it is already nearing 800,000 views. Allocca notes that this video is just one of many on YouTube that portray dominoes as an emerging art form. In May, FlippyCat created a piece with 60,000 dominoes, a personal record. Other popular domino artist channels include Shanesdominoez and MikeMazeguy.

Why You Should Spiral-Cut Your Wiener - CHOW TipchowWhy You Should Spiral-Cut Your Wiener - CHOW Tip Just in time for the Fourth of

July comes this short and sweet 49-second clip on how and why to cut your hot dog into a corkscrew shape before throwing it on the grill. Allocca said this video was the most popular food video of the week.

The channel behind the clip: Chow also has had success with a series of videos on how to open beer bottles with your forearm, with a single sheet of paper and with a pen.

'The Star Wars That I Used To Know' - Gotye 'Somebody That I Used To Know' Parodyteddiefilms'The Star Wars That I Used to Know - Gotye 'Somebody That I Used to Know' Parody

Belgian-Australian singer-songwriter Gotye scored a major YouTube hit with an artsy video for his song "Somebody That I Used to Know." That video hit YouTube last July and has since been viewed more than 265 million times. One year in, it is still inspiring covers and parodies -- including this one, which turns the song into a conversation between a disgruntled ¿Star Wars¿ fan and George Lucas. This video was posted Wednesday and already has more than 1 million views.

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Comments (2)

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JosephLCooke at 3:25 PM July 01, 2012

YouTube has improved their technology to where uploading is blisteringly fast. Way to go, guys.

Laura Palmer at 10:15 AM June 30, 2012

Star Wars I Used To Know is supposed to be Anakin/Darth Vader, not just some fan.

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