We all know what the best YouTube videos are – they're either videos of a) angry German children, b) idiots ghostriding the whip or c) clips of The Colbert Report before Comedy Central removes them – notice an absence of hugging in that list?

Hugging is apparently big on the internet. So big, in fact, that when YouTube decided to run an inaugural awards ceremony to find the best videos submitted to it, the winner of the YouTube award for 'inspiration' turned out to be Free Hugs, a video of a slightly creepy Australian man hugging a selection of strangers while a piece of music that sounds as if it was specifically designed to soundtrack an emotional episode of Dawson's Creek plays in the background. But perhaps Free Hugs does deserve to win a YouTube award for inspiration, because it has single-handedly inspired us to exclusively use Metacafe from now on.

Oh, the internet – we had you all wrong. Here we were, thinking that people only went on you to read hecklerspray, look at porn or pose as schoolgirls in unregulated chatrooms, but no. Apparently people use the internet to look at something called YouTube as well. YouTube, for the uninitiated, is a website where people can film themselves talking about themselves and then let other people watch it before making a video of themselves talking about themselves and posting it as a reply. YouTube is also, thankfully, the place to see a fat mental German kid screaming "Go go go go go! Eat your melted shit!" at a computer, a fat American boy almost getting dragged out of a rollercoaster while his mother laughs at him or a vastly inappropriate 9/11 mime.

Strangely enough, though, when it came to the YouTube Awards, all of the above were strangely ignored. Instead, the people voting on the YouTube Awards decided to hand a prize to Free Hugs, a video of an unsafe-looking man strolling around an Australian city hugging strangers and then letting go before they realise that he was probably jabbing a hard-on into their thigh and sniffing their hair. Despite being almost illegally creepy, Free Hugs won the Most Inspirational YouTube Award, a fact that leads us to believe that there are an awful lot of daft numpties in the world. You want to see the YouTube Award-winning Free Hugs? OK, but don't say we didn't warn you…

Now go and rinse your eyes out. But Free Hugs wasn't the only winner of a YouTube Award this year – winners in other YouTube Award categories included the once-funny treadmill video to Here It Goes Again by OK Go, a video of a man on a beach, a video of an Asian man whining in a chair and a quite-good cartoon of a kiwi. It goes without saying that not even one of these comes close to the video of Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street in 1972, though.

So is that what YouTube viewers want? Videos of hippies hugging? That sort of makes us a bit nauseous, and we can't help hoping that the 2008 YouTube awards show a bigger leap of quality. Incidentally, if the 2008 YouTube Awards feature a category about gameshow hosts being temporarily befuddled about how to respond to Scottish insomniac amputees, we've already found a winner:

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YouTube Awards – YouTube