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:-)

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…

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

And this is freaking hilarious!

This is a strangely fascinating movie about the execution of one, two, three chocolate bunnies. Was it in the viral video chart in the past? If not, it has the potential to make it – and to find tons of emulators as well. Remixes are already on Youtube.

Here is one that’s currently #2 in the viral video chart – amazing material. And although it’s all different people, it kind of makes you worry how fast life might go by.

Here is #3 – again people as the visual material, reminding one inevitably of Siegfried Kracauer’s “Ornament der Masse” (The Mass ornament). Whether it’s synchronized swimming or military parades or this viral video: Mankind seems not to can get enough of seeing its kind move as one body.

Currently #1 of the viral video charts: Somebody pleading really intensely to leave Britney alone. Some strong emotions going on here. Too bad they’re wasted on a celebrity, although the cause is admirable.

A (woman) friend sent me a link to this viral for a (true or fake, I don’t care) brand of cosmetics. The pun is supposed to consist in a fairy conventional turning around of mainstream erotic stimuli. Instead of a voluptuous blond smearing her tits with whipped cream, you have a half-naked chef doing the same thing. Or massaging your bread. And where the blond would have eaten a banana, he’s eating oysters. Yaawn! I would never ever forward this to a befriended female, not even a befriended gay male, even though the male body is much more the object of fetishization in male homosexual than in female heterosexual peer groups. I think. It certainly doesn’t stimulate me, it annoys me deeply. Maybe I am just an exception to the rule. If women in commercials are treated like sexual objects, it certainly doesn’t help to just do the same to men. And neither is it revolutionary. Grrrrr.

EDIT: It’s not even a proper turning around of the rules of the game. Just hover over the buttons with your mouse, and what you’ll here is the moaning of a _Female_ – now what is that supposed to do to a heterosexual female audience? But I’m sure the undoubtedly male creative director of the bunch who created this enjoyed this a lot.

EDIT: OH NO! IT GETS WORSE! The next one seeking to take over from the naked chef are THE PLUMBER (THE pornography regular, mal eben ein Rohr verlegen), the FIREMAN who got your PUSSYCAT down from the three, and the PLUMBER who has finished TRIMMING YOUR BUSHES:

…when you cooperate to spread a marketing message, for instance the one that the new Skoda Fabia is “Full of Lovely Stuff”. The subtitle to this message reads: “They really made this cake!” The unearthing of Julia Andrew’s My Favourite Things rounds off the whole thing – I hate to find myself so susceptible to mainstream messages, and in particular to those obvious messages that ‘no living soul’ is supposed to be able to dislike, such as:

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

(It’s in this disdain that my colleague Greg is right about accusing me for romanticizing old people, e.g. The Zimmers)

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad

Just because Jetsam brought up the subject of cats that look like Hitler: Here it is once more (for the first time on this blog) – the essence of a Kitler, a cat that looks like Hitler:

More Kitlers on www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com – although the site’s rather an example of why web 2.0 can only go wrong if it’s done with a web 1.0 mindset: The supposed top ten kitlers hardly look like Hitler at all, but they owners probably were the most relentless ones when it came to hitting the ‘vote’ button.

And this my own post contains a deliberate lie: The Kitler is definitely not the oldest meme or virus on the web. The oldest in the cat department is the Bonsai kitten (btw, what’s the thing with cats and the web anyway?***), and the oldest meme on the web that I know is the good old “End of the Internet”. Does anybody know anything older than that?

***) Check this out! The tags most closely related to ‘meme’ on wordpress are:
* Blogging
* Humor
* Life
* Cats
* Entertainment
* LOLCats
* Personal
* Thoughts
* humour
* Blog

WTF?

More specifically at a recent post about their Picasso package on special offer. How do I know? The blog stats told me: I had a total of 14 visitors come in via http://forum.tchibo-intranet.de/topic.asp?whichpage=3&ARCHIVE=&TOPIC_ID=5696 – you won’t be able to access this site, because it’s on their intranet and not accessible from the outside. Which means that somebody from Tchibo found and posted a link to this site in their forums. So let’s see what is going to happen now:

a) NOTHING: If the folks at Tchibo are all cool and down with the web 2.0 , they won’t do anything but secretly laugh up their sleeve for having made it onto the blogosphere. I didn’t exactly praise them for selling off one of the 20th century’s most influential artists as a bargain, but it’s the attention that counts anyway (AND they got a direct link to their sales pages, even if the turnover might be minimal).

b) SOMETHING: If they’re just as anxious as that program director from the European Graduate School (who felt the need to admonish me for “not having done my homework” a while ago when I wrote what I thought about their program) they’ll come up with SOME attempt to control their product communication, even though that’s entirely futile. One can’t have viral marketing without the loss of control, and if that’s what they want, then they should probably switch to the Tupperware marketing concept. Buy only from a selected dealer at your own home.

P.S.: Tchibo is a German coffee chain, but their biggest source of revenue isn’t coffee, but the gifts and household articles which they sell in their shops and online. Once a week, they introduce a new range of themed products, with about four themes on sale at a time – a concept that works pretty well in the themed world of consumer capitalism. I admit that I bought a bag of green plastic crystals from them just a little while ago, because I thought the crystals looked like Superman’s Kryptonite (and who wouldn’t want to have a pocket full of Kryptonite):