It’s here y’all, and it’s just around the corner. This year’s Project for Awesome promises to be bigger and better than ever. If you don’t know quite what I’m talking about, here’s the gist.

Every year on December 17th, members of the YouTube community have gathered together to promote charities in their videos and then promote those videos, ensuring that they get a lot of views.

There are a few reasons why we like to do this.

1. Raising money for charity is just good, and it’s fun and feels especially right around this time of the year (sorry for those of you who are taking your final exams…)
2. We love the idea that there is a sector of the economy that exists solely to make the world better. Not to make money or products or entertaining videos of adorable cats…but just FOR AWESOME.
3. We like to get YouTube together once a year to work on something together. It’s a great time for up-comming video makers to show their chops impress the folks who think their hot shots but really are just lucky they got here first.

The guidelines for making a video are simple. Just make a video that promotes a charity that you care about and believe in. It can be anything, it doesn’t even have to be a registered non-profit. It’s up to you to sell the organization and the work that their doing to the people watching your video, but it’s also important that you make the video entertaining. The more entertaining, the more people will watch, the more opportunity you have to promote that charity. We’ve got the 2009 P4A Thumbnail to include with your video, and / or the video logo available now.

As we did last year, John and Hank Green will each be putting up $1,000 of their own money to give away to the charities featured in their favorite videos this year.

During the day of December 17th, we will gather here for a 24 hour long live show in which we will be organizing the effort to promote Project for Awesome videos. You can sign up for the mailing list in the upper right hand corner if you want to stay informed throughout the day.