Online Site URDB Takes on Guinness World Records

For Mike MacDonald, an interest in ungulate mammals was less important than everlasting glory. During a 2009 San Diego radio broadcast, the 29-year-old Web developer had a tattoo artist ink three giraffes onto his left shoulder, thereby setting a world record for Most Giraffe Tattoos on a Shoulder. While MacDonald had successfully beaten the record set by Australian Daniel Fowler, his triumph was fleeting. Beaten but not cowed, Fowler struck back 3½ months later, adding three tattoos on his shoulder—thereby setting a new new world record, of four giraffe tattoos on a shoulder. "As long as I am the man with the most giraffe tattoos on a shoulder," Fowler says, "I will die a happy man."

does not a have a category for most giraffe tattoos on a shoulder. Instead, MacDonald and Fowler battled for the title through a website that's threatening to usurp the London-based behemoth's 56-year hegemony of the world-record industry: the Universal Record Database (urdb.org), the superlative compendium of the Information Age. "Our spirit is pure democracy," says Dan Rollman, 37, the Canadian-born, Brooklyn-dwelling co-founder of the site. "We take the power of the Internet, democratize world records, and create an online space where anybody can set a new world record."