Seems like scrutinizing the Viral Video chart twice a week is finally paying off (on the level of my analytic capabilities, that is)! In January I wondered whether the bunny rabbit meltdown had already made it into the viral video chart - it hadn’t but now it has finally entered. It’s #9 as we speak – of course it needed Easter to make it break through:-)

… there comes another niche that has previously eluded me (or rather: that I deliberately ignored –> information overflow).

Youtube thinks of launching Live Video in 2008 (Pop17) | Yahoo Live – Live Video Service | Ustream – Live Video Service | BlogTv – idem | Operator11 – idem | Justin TV – notable Life Caster

Godammit. How to keep track (or why)?

Accha, accha, accha, accha, accha, accha – which song or movie was the source for this film? Lallopallo, Nova – can you help? I am sure this will do for the US Indian community what Will.i.am’s Obama video did for white intellectuals.

Thanks to Cabbage for posting about this!

I don’t have much time to blog today, but I’ll leave this for your consideration. What do you think: Is it a fake (i.e has somebody with more media competency prompted this girl to do this as a skit in front of the camera) or has media competency finally reached the margins of society (and to which avail)?

One of my favourite web micro-narratives – the ‘Dramatic Look‘, which generated a few remixes, but not a real meme – is now on the verge of evolving: Enter ‘Dramatic Lemur‘ (watch with sound only).

UPDATE: The meme is gaining momentum – her is the Dramatic Prairie Cat (not as funny, but…) EDIT: That’s the tough thing about memes: The first time you see them they come across as soooo fresh and then you realize the Prairy Cat is more than half a year old. Need to think about the redefinition of ‘NEWS’ that this implies…

It’s not as though it’s breaking news that our visual culture has become increasingly sexed up – yet it is kind of irritating that moving images of people engaging in sexual actions have become part of the web folklore. Yes, we’ve all heard of or seen Two Girls One Cup – which is certainly fake, yet aesthetically still falls into the porn category. The latest movie that is now being blogged about is Smurf porn: Real people dress up as Smurfs (i.e. paint themselves blue, put on white hats) and start romping about. The cast: Smurfette, two regular smurfs, Papa Smurf and Gargamel. Here is the link: You need to copy and paste it if you want to see it, and yes, it really is porn, so don’t watch it in the office or in the presence of minors:* http://www.redtube.com/8399 At least it gives a lot of people a good pretext for watching porn: “I just wanted to see the smurfs!” (At least that was my lame excuse:-)

I wonder whether Donnie Darko inspired them to do this movie? Here is the scene in which Donnie and his friends talk about the sexual life of Smurfs (no saucy scenes included!):

*It IS porn, but not very well done. The art direction sucks – two smurfs take their hats off (which spoils their costume of course), also Gargamel should have stayed partly dressed to not ruin the impression, and they really should have used blue condoms. If it’s to be a real smurf, it’s got to be all blue, from head to toe.

BTW: I wonder whether these movies are manually removed from the viral video chart?

On Realpop, I read about the latest “The Downfall” meme: Take the scene from The Downfall in which Hitler/Bruno Ganz learns that Steiner couldn’t gather enough forces to attack and add new subtitles to it, changing The Downfall of Hitler to The Downfall of HDVD or The Downfall of the Cowboys. While Ganz’ acting features the theatrical type of speech that is known from Hitler speeches – and which is on a phonetic level sufficiently close to Chaplin’s idiom as Hynkel in The Great Dictator – it is certainly good material for being subtitled. Too bad though that the trick won’t work if you know German: It’ impossible to shut out and not understand the words of your mother tongue:-(

Anonymous’ message to Scientoloy (currently #2 in the viral video chart):

And this is freaking hilarious!

While I do think that I am pretty well wired to the interwebs, the occasional fad does escape me. The Numa Numa Lip synching fad, for instance. I didn’t even know the classic Numa Numa impression by a guy called Gary Broisma.

And since I stopped listening to the radio some years ago (why? Austria has got fm4 – what else do you need?), I was also (at least consciously) unaware of the existence of the song featured in that vid: Dragostea Din Tei. Not a song one needs to be worried about having missed, yet I have a terrible propensity towards getting carried away by songs with ear-tingling rhythms, no matter how foreseeable they are. This does, of course, make me a dupe of the culture industries, and of Dragostea Din Tei, but hey, dancing is good for the soul and the body, so I am not even trying to restrain myself.

I deeply understand Gary’s enthusiasm.

This video below is my favourite of all Numa Numa versions (after having watched Gary for half a dozen times). My favourite lines are “Graze the flesh there” and “Ragu sledding yay”:

…and fundamentally so – and while I was busy playing with that nifty “convert youtube to quicktime” online application on vixy.net (not a good name to venture into the German market, btw, as a “Wichser” – pronounced vixa – is a, eh, wanker).

And that I guess is also the reason why you cannot see any of the vids in the previous post. I hope they are going to recover without any losses – what a sadness that would be, if all thoses videos, both generated for online audiences and the TV and video gems of the olden days, suddenly disappeared from the screens of the world for good.

Update: And there it is again!