So you can roll your tongue… but can you do a wave, a clover, what about a happy face?! This has got to be seen to be believed…

Popularity: 5%

I’ve skimmed through a few articles in recent weeks of a stupid music video that has everyone stumped because it rose to become the most viewed youtube video of all time - even beating the evolution of dancing guy. I thought nothing of it because I think the dancing guy isn’t worth watching either and wondered why he was the most watched vid. There’s also other mysterious vids - like magibon, the girl who just stares at the camera but gets a million views (seriously…wtf?!). So as you can see, most viewed does not mean most entertaining or best vid.

What’s really taken my attention though is that a few days ago though, Clarus Bartel (the guy who uploaded the video), has pulled it down citing

“I was fed up [with the abuse and accusations of statistical manipulation], I am not interested in the first place if this is the price I have to pay.”

It’s such a shame because it was a part of internet history ( Luckily, some resourceful people have put it back up here, here, and here). What it shows is that too many people get affected by what gets said online (hence all the uproar about cyber bullying). There’s always going to be people online who don’t like you, you just have to learn to filter it out and get on with what you are doing. If it is warranted negatively, then take it constructively, improve, and move on. If it is personal attacks, then don’t bother replying or justifying yourself as it is often futile and only ends up in more flaming wars.

What I think Bartel should have done was just to leave all the commenting there and leave it to the youtube administrators to moderate the comments ( I wonder if he could have requested for commenting to be closed off!). In the end, they are just comments and they do not take away the significance of his achievements. He should have also gotten in touch with a celebrity agent, flown around the world doing all the letterman, rove, and leno shows that he can get his face in, and laugh all the way to the bank!

My personal theory of why his vid became so popular was that he started off by using some highly searched for tags like ipod, sex, girls, hot, obama (whatever). I know because one of my friends has a video and he changes his tag to some closely related keywords and bam he has a few thousand views overnight. The key though was the next step where this hit the bloggersphere and became viral. As blog after blog chases this story, more and more people around the world - hence all the legit IPs - hit the vid. Finally, it reaches mainstream print media and bam, there’s no stopping it. Again, this proves the power of the collective blogging community - we have the power to control rankings and move elections! Well that’s my theory anyway… then again there could be the other one where the Russian bot net mafia was just randomly testing out their tools and accidentally took this one too far.

Popularity: 6%