VEVO and YouTube have once again partnered with American Express to launch a five-concert series of live performances this summer. “Unstaged: An Original Series from American Express” will kick off with a live-streamed performance by Arcade Fire at Madison Square Garden on August 5. Earlier this year YouTube and VEVO united with American Express to stream both the Alicia Keys and The National performances which contributed to the decision to create another concert series.

The summer series will feature the work of several acclaimed directors, and some cool social media features like “Choose Your Cam” which will allow viewers to control their experience by switching between camera streams. Other performances will include The Roots and John Legend.

Do you think this concert series will help establish YouTube and VEVO in the online music community? What performances would you like to see streamed?

Take a look at the teaser for the live-streamed concert by The Nationals in Brooklyn last May.

Last week Yahoo! Movies released the first full-length trailer for The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher.

The film is an adaptation of the book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich. The Social Network is about the early days of Facebook, and addresses some of the issues facing the company today. The film also draws parallels from the fictionalized account of its start in The Accidental Billionaires.

Mezrich recreates the foundation and rise of the Facebook phenomenon, although loosely connected to real events, which tells the story of two Harvard undergrads who revolutionized how we connect to others. The road to the initial Facebook concept was paved with betrayal, vast amounts of cash and two friends who wanted nothing more than to be cool. It’s juicy, fast-paced and if the book is any indication, the film is going to be a must see!

What do you think of the trailer? Are you going to see the film in theaters this October?

“A day to celebrate the revolution of media becoming social. Celebrate Social Media Day with Mashable by attending or organizing a meetup near you June 30th. Connect with your social media community!”

Mashable is hosting the first worldwide celebration for Social Media Day today, June 30th. As of now, Mashable has over 350+ social media day meetups planned around the world! Who doesn’t use social media these days??

Here are some social media facts that I discovered on Socialnomics:

1. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
2. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
3. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 300 million users)
4. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
5. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
6. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
7. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
8. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
9. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
10. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
11. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
12. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
13. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
14. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
15. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
16. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
17. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
18. Only 14% trust advertisements
19. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
20. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone

Clearly social media is becoming a huge part of all of our lives! I use Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, our blog and many other websites to help gain online visibility for my event planning company. Social media has become the best way to non-invasively spread the word about what you’re doing, so I will very happily celebrate this day. Afterall, It has saved me from dreadful sales calls.

Jed Singer, the coordinator of the Social Media Day celebration in Philadelphia said, “I just love how social media tethers everyone together, and brings people closer in the real world. It’s amazing how far we’ve come from forums and message boards, to blogging, uploading video, microblogging, geolocating,” he said. “The fact that anyone can instantly publish anything to the web has really changed the world.”

Want to participate??

• Meetup Everywhere Mashable: Sign up to attend or organize your own event on the Meetup Everywhere Mashable.
• RSVP to the Facebook Event: RSVP and upload photos from your meetup to Mashable’s Facebook event page.
• Upload to Flickr: Upload photos to Flickr and tag them with #smday.
• Follow @mashSMday: Follow @mashSMday on Twitter for updates and developments on the celebration.
• Tweet: Use the #smday hashtag on Twitter. With so many participating, it will be a trending topic on Twitter on June 30.

There will be prizes for those that tweet or post the event on FB! How has social media helped you??

We’ve all heard of Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, and Twitter.  Maybe you have an account on one or the other, or even all four.  You, with millions of other users, are along the ride of being available 24/7 to have friends, family members, and other networks to see your information, profile, and pictures.  Now being able to share posts on your daily life exercises and thoughts, we- as a social networking obsessed world- are now officially spend 82% more time on these sites compared to the amount of time we put just a year earlier.

So much time that some of us are putting in the number of hours equivalent to a full-time job – a full-time job that doesn’t take a break on weekends. If the average person spends around five and a half hours a day, seven days a week, that leads one to a little shy of forty hours. Didn’t think you spent that much time each week, did you?

And it’s not just the United States that is infatuated with social networking. Australia, Switzerland, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Spain, and the entire U.K is shortly behind us. In Fact, the US may have the most people belonging to these groups, but Australians have the lead for times-per-day visits. Around the globe, people are interested in having people follow them and have people interested in what they are doing; all day, everyday.  Are we in a self-obsessed world, or just a world that loves to communicate with each other? With social networking up by 82% from last year, how much longer will it be before all of our time is spent on the computer?

Oh, the power of YouTube.

We all know, watch, and laugh at videos on YouTube.  From the hilarious thirty-second home videos people share to the minutes long music videos and professional filmed broadcasts.  We all can agree, YouTube is America’s Funniest Home Videos of the Internet.  Now YouTube is coming from a whole new direction: movie rentals.  YouTube plans to sell five full-length independent movies drawn from the 2010 and 2009 Sundance Film Festivals in February 2010.  These five films include the award winning, “The Cove,” “Children of Invention,” as well as “Bass Ackwards,” “Homewrecker,” and “One Too Many Mornings.”

While movie rental competitors include Blockbuster, RedBox, and iTunes, YouTube is offering the bargain price of $3.99 for 24-48 hours per video rental. This small fee will be split between YouTube and the content provider. The viewer must use Google Checkout services to legally pay for the film and have it for the complete rental period.  This is all part of Youtube’s “Filmmakers Wanted” campaign which helps to attract more film makers from Sundance but to also broaden their client spectrum of the entertainment industry to having health and education sectors come on board soon.

The minimal selection of five movies may not be enough to grab your attention quite yet, but YouTube hopes to accomplish the idea of going global within the year; providing a plethora of movies to choose from in the comfort of your own home and on your lap.