The winners of the second annual YouTube Awards have been announced today, offering the top choices in twelve different categories (up from seven last year) as voted on by the website’s users. In an interesting twist from other people’s choice-style awards, YouTube has revealed the exact percentage of votes awarded to each winner.

The winner for best Commentary, What The Buck Show’s coverage on the death of fictional YouTube star LonelyGirl15, took the highest percentage by grabbing 43% of its category’s votes whereas the race was the tightest in the Sports category with the winner, a clip showing skateboarders riding through a balloon-filled pool, earning its trophy with a mere 20.8% of the votes.

As with last year, it was the YouTube staff themselves who chose the list of nominees and categories from which users had to vote on and this year their choices included many of the clips that have been featured on national television and lampooned by late night comedians. Chris Crocker’s Leave Britney Alone plea, Obama Girl’s love letter to US presidential candidate Barack Obama, the tasering of a U of Florida student at a John Kerry speech, Soulja Boy Tellem’s instructional dance video, Nora the piano-playing cat, and Kassie the 3 year-old girl’s fighting words on monsters were all up for awards this year, but despite massive mainstream coverage, lost to clips with lower exposure. Even internet legend Chuck Norris, who appeared with Mick Huckabee in a clip that was up for the Politics category, failed to grab the win.

The only exception was Tay Zonday and his song “Chocolate Rain”, it won in the Music category with 28.4% of the votes. When the clip was first released early last year, it became an immediate hit across the internet, earning Tay both coverage and invites to appear on many mainstream television shows including Jimmel Kimmel here in North America and the Lily Allen and Friends show in the U.K.

As with last year’s event, the winners are a surprising mix, and appear to represent the tastes of an international audience looking to favor something new.In the Politics category, users ignored the clips featuring Hilary Clinton, Ron Paul and other American figures and instead awarded “Stop the Clash of Civilizations”, a montage of images and text calling for peace in the Middle East that was created by the international web group Avaaz.org.The Eyewitness category was a new one this year, giving exposure to live moments captured by people who just happened to be at the right place, the right time, and with a camcorder ready. These included footage of natural disasters and political moments, but the clip that grabbed the top spot was of a three-way stand-off in the wild between a pack of lions, two crocodiles, and a herd of water buffalo at South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

In the Comedy category, Canadian troupe PicNicFace who’s “PowerThirst” video has been singled out by comedian Will Farrell as one of the funniest online, lost to the Potter Puppet Pals, a regular online series of handpuppet shows that spoof the popular Harry Potter novels with songs and skits. Hollywood actor and funnyman Paul Rudd’s (Knocked Up, The 40 Year-Old Virgin) series of comedic shorts with David Wain failed to grab more votes than the lesser known group “The Guild” who produce skits and shorts for fans of video games.Video games was also the winning theme in the Creative category where a stop-motion recreation of the game Tetris using a movie theatre and a group of volunteers won out over other orchestrated clips that played songs backwards, choreographed drawings, and morphed images.

One of the big trends in online videos this past year was the rise of how to clips, something YouTube represented this year with the introduction of an Instructional category. Who would have thought that of all the skills being shared online that it would be a clip showing how to solve a Rubik’s Cube would win, but it did beating out other clips that showed tricks involving the Nintendo Wii remote, iPods, and t-shirt prints. At 71 minutes long, Four-Eyed Monsters, a film on loneliness and personal struggle, was certainly the longest entry in the awards, a fact that might have hurt its chances in the Inspirational category where it lost to a television report on a university student capable of creating beautiful paintings despite being blind. “Blind Painter” was a surprising entry in this year’s awards as was original produced for and aired on Texas broadcast television, which you’d expect would disqualify it from submission.

Another new category this year is the Short Film selection, which included both live action and animated works. Each week here on my blog I feature two animated shorts and have done so for over a year and a half, and I was disappointed to see that none of them made it into selection. The winner is a fictional live action short called “My Name Is Lisa” that uses situational comedy to explore themes regarding Alzheimer’s. If there’s one category that quickly separates the YouTubes from other awards ceremonies, it’s the Adorable selection which pits cute animals against precocious kids and adorable babies. This year it was a laughing baby who’s unstoppable giggles over ripped paper pulled in 25.1% of the votes over a selection of popular cat videos.

With annual awards ceremonies, such as the Oscars, the Grammys, etc. it’s often expected that the list of winners will represent and encapsulate the popular trends of that industry for a given year, and certainly that would be the hope of the YouTube Awards, but what is interesting to see now that they have completed two years, is that historians of the future will be better served to look at the list of nominees for indicators of what was popular or reflective of the trends in the past year than the winners, which seem to reflect the tastes of YouTube users during the awards week. It will be interesting to see how YouTube evolves these awards in the coming years and what steps they might take to try to address that.