Crave

From the creators of "Drawn Together" comes "DJ & The Fro," a new daily, animated show on MTV. The 404 speaks to the creators, Matt Silverstein and Dave Jeser, about the show and talk about how Michael Jackson's death almost ruined the shows' first few episodes.

(Credit: MTV Networks)

The show creators call it a rip-off of "Beavis and Butthead" for the viral video generation. DJ and the Fro are two twenty-somethings, who spend most of their day watching viral videos and commenting on them. Sounds eerily similar to what The 404 guys do all day long. Anyway, the guys tell us about how the show came into being and let us know that a "Drawn Together" straight-to-DVD movie is coming out as well!

"DJ & The Fro" reminds us a bit of "Tosh.0" on Comedy Central, which premiered just a few weeks ago. The 404 guys think we should have jumped on to this bandwagon a long time. This is what we do already for the show every day!

Anyway, hope you all enjoy the abbreviated show along with our Michael Jackson commentary. He will be missed. Spend your weekend listening to your favorite MJ jam and reminisce about the fond memories you had while karaoking to "Billie Jean."

A colleague sent me this video Lenovo made and published to its official blog. My jaw dropped. Not because the content is particularly shocking or offensive, but because of how incredibly misplaced and lame it is as a Lenovo ad.

If anything, it makes clear one thing: Lenovo's talents lie in selling huge volumes of ThinkPads to business customers, and notably not in making smart, hip Internet video.

In the video, a guy recounts to his male co-worker a late-night work session with their female colleague the night before. While he and the girl are working, he starts describing the features of the new W700ds workstation from Lenovo. As he does this, she inexplicably begins removing various items of clothing until, it is suggested but not shown entirely, she is completely undressed.

Needless to say, the video is probably not safe for work for the average corporate office. But besides that, it's just odd. Does this video really find its home in the demographic that will buy this monstrous, expensive workstation? It's hard to imagine.

What's worse, this product is entirely remarkable on its own merits, and requires no suggestive videos to be noticed: It's a laptop with two screens. People will take notice without some silly video that makes the company appear as if it is trying way too hard.

If you're any kind of Internet viral video junkie--you know who you are--then last week you smirked at the Bike Hero video. In case you somehow missed it, Bike Hero is a video of a guy on a bike playing Guitar Hero with markers left on the pavement. Sadly, we soon found out it was a viral video put together by Activision's new creative team.

However, a challenger has appeared! By mounting a TV in the back of a car and using a wireless Guitar Hero controller, ex-Seattleite and competitive Guitar Hero player Freddy Wong posted a video of himself doing one better: melting your face with a blistering Dragonforce solo while riding a bike down the street.

You need to see it to believe it, but this is a masterpiece. Hats off to you, Mr. Wong. Keep rocking on the freeway.

Titled "Why every guy should buy their girlfriend a Wii Fit," the YouTube clip shows 25-year-old Lauren Bernat hula hooping in time with the fitness video game in her T-shirt and underwear. The video has been viewed more than 2.4 million times and was suspected to be a viral marketing ploy for Nintendo's Wii Fit.

The speculation emerged after learning that both Lauren Bernat and Giovanny Gutierrez, who filmed the footage, work in advertising. Gutierrez works as the director of Interactive Media for Tinsley Advertising in Miami, Florida. Bernat works as an account executive at the same company, where her duties include evaluating the responses to the company's Internet advertising.

Nintendo has denied that the footage is part of an advertising campaign. "This has, and is, absolutely 100 percent, nothing to do with Nintendo," a spokesman said. "Nintendo did not create it and was not aware of it until it was brought to our attention."

Gutierrez has also denied that it was a viral advertisement for the Wii Fit. Gutierrez says he filmed Bernat to show the world how attractive his girlfriend is. "My girlfriend loves Wii Fit and looks hot doing it."

Bernat says she was unaware she was being filmed by her boyfriend on his mobile phone and was extremely upset with him at first, but is now reveling in her 15 minutes of fame as the "Wii Fit Girl," adding she would have made herself more attractive if she had known about the camera.

The game--which incorporates yoga, balance, strength training, and aerobics--hardly needs the free publicity. Even Amazon has a purchase limit policy in place for the Wii Fit because of the shortages across the U.S. Now does that sound like Nintendo is hurting for some sales?

The YouTube video has done much to boost the profile of Gutierrez, Bernat, and the ad agency where they work, so it looks as if everybody wins regardless.

On Friday morning, YouTube announced the second annual iteration of its YouTube Video Awards. What? Awards?

The video-sharing service, owned by Google since 2006, awarded accolades in categories like "Adorable," "Creative," and "Comedy" to original videos hosted on its site that were uploaded in 2007, as voted on by users. The prizes, per YouTube, are "bragging rights, a trophy, and a special invitation to an event later this year."

Okay, so the videos are kind of amusing. The "Adorable" category winner is a video of a baby who falls over every time he laughs (wonder what'll happen when his friends find out about that in 10 years), the "Creative" winner is that "Human Tetris" thing you've seen a million times, and the "Music" winner is none other than that "Chocolate Rain" video that everyone was watching last year.

But the culture of YouTube doesn't really lend itself that well to awards. YouTube, for better or worse, is a cultural hub rather than strictly a creative outpost; there's plenty of cool, original content there, and it's no surprise that Google would want to highlight the good stuff rather than the goofy prank videos and pirated content that propelled it to the upper echelon of the Web.

Content on YouTube, however, doesn't necessarily become popular because it's high-quality or original--just look at the Rickroll phenomenon, an '80s music video that has been seen millions of times because people get a kick out of tricking their friends into watching it. Or the current hot clip, a British public service announcement with a hilarious twist.

Or, for that matter, this week's number-one YouTube video: Barack Obama's most recent speech.

NEW YORK--Will it blend? This innovative ad campaign sure did.

A lot of Madison Avenue types have packed into midtown Manhattan's upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel for the annual OnMedia NYC conference, a sort of Silicon-Valley-meets-the-ad-industry event. The conference, which started Monday and ends Wednesday, is presented by new-media trade publication AlwaysOn. At the end of the day on Tuesday, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins announced 2007's "Best of Broadband (BOB) Awards," a hand-picked list of the top Web video ads that achieved viral success and actually worked.

Gimmicky? Of course. But after a day of panels and interviews, with plenty of talk of monetization and ROI and user engagement and the attention economy and just about every other ad-industry cliche you've ever heard of (as well as some you haven't), it was quite refreshing to watch a bunch of YouTube videos representing ad campaigns that actually worked. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.

Among the winners were winners of user-generated ad contests like Frito Lay's "Crash the Super Bowl" competition; faux-amateur clips like Ray-Ban's "Never Hide" ad; too-edgy-for-TV spots like one of Unilever's Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads; and naturally, "Will It Blend?" The YouTube video series from blender manufacturer BlendTec had been created without the help of an extrenal agency, and had already built up quite a fan base when it published the notorious "iPhone in a blender" video.

The full list is here. But what I'd like to know is, for every one of these runaway hits, how many equally creative Web video ad campaigns flop? I'm still a believer in randomness on the Web. But then again, I can't see any way that a guy putting an iPhone into a blender and hitting the "smoothie" button couldn't have been a huge hit.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one-time pop darling Britney Spears' performance at the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this month was a total and utter trainwreck.

Chris Crocker's 'Britney manifesto'

(Credit: YouTube)

But, as viral video fans soon learned, some crazy guy with a YouTube account didn't agree. He promptly put up a clip of questionable sanity in which he lay in bed, sobbing, begging us haters to "Leave Britney Alone." The video has racked up nearly 8 million views on YouTube, reaching a degree of overkill that's made many of us hope the buzz will fade away quickly or give way to some other irritating pop-culture sensation.

But don't hold your breath. That impassioned young fellow is Chris Crocker, a 19-year-old from Tennessee whose 15 minutes (seconds?) of fame just might not quite be over: Variety is reporting that a television production company, 44 Blue Productions, has inked a deal with him for a potential TV show. It's not totally serendipitous, as the entertainment site explained that Crocker has actually had a sizeable MySpace following for some time now, and that he's been on 44 Blue's radar for almost a year.

"(The show is) going to pretty much be the 'Chris Crocker experience,'" 44 Blue co-founder Rasha Drachkovitch told Variety. "We consider him a rebel character that people will find interesting. He's going to be a TV star." In other words, they're catering to the Perez Hilton demographic.

Is nothing sacred anymore?

We know the next few days are just going to be iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. That's why we're bringing something completely different to you: the Dramatic Chipmunk (who is really a prairie dog, but you knew that already) is back. Except, thanks to a little bit of low-grade video editing, he (she?) is now the Darthmatic Chipmunk. Thanks, CollegeHumor!

It's a well-documented phenomenon: the rise of Web video has fueled a trend of 'bite-size entertainment.' Wired magazine devoted an entire cover story (actually, a set of mini cover stories) to it in its March '07 issue. The attention-deficient Web's appetite for small clips and short blog entries has gotten to the point where MySpace.com has actually condensed classic TV episodes into "minisodes" for its members.

But the latest viral video craze makes those three- to five-minute minisodes seem like Titanic. This is the "Dramatic Chipmunk," a 5-second clip of a chubby rodent making a foreboding face at the camera accompanied by a Snidely Whiplash-worthy musical interlude. (Bonus points if you know who Snidely Whiplash is.) The video proliferated, thanks to YouTube, as well as frat boy hub CollegeHumor, which put a link to the clip on its front page and touted it as "the best 5-second video on the Internet."

You can already tell that, after only a few days (the video was originally uploaded earlier this week), it's reached the gold-medal level of viral videos--somebody made a dance remix.

Here at CNET, we had a little bit of a debate about whether the "Dramatic Chipmunk" footage was actually real. Was it doctored in one way or another to make the chipmunk look more Hitchcock-esque? If it proved real, we wanted to know who the heck managed to capture the moment on video.

An e-mail to CollegeHumor Managing Editor Jeff Rubin answered our question: yup, it's real. The clip comes from a Japanese TV show in which the rodent was put on display for some reason. The priceless 5 seconds appear to have been the result of a very, very lucky camera angle.

CollegeHumor has uploaded the original footage and named it "Undramatic Chipmunk." You can see it here. And the full video also reveals, as zoology buffs had suspected, that the "Dramatic Chipmunk" isn't actually a chipmunk but rather a prairie dog.

UPDATE @ 1 PM PST: Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, CollegeHumor's in-house T-shirt retailer, BustedTees, is now selling a Dramatic Chipmunk t-shirt.