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(Credit: Funny or Die)

Funny or Die, the comedy site co-founded by actor Will Ferrell, rose to fame a year ago with a wildly popular video called "The Landlord." Plans for the site are growing as fast as Ferrell's fro.

On Wednesday, the site snagged an equity investment from HBO. Funny or Die, which already had the backing of Sequoia Capital, also will also produce 10 half-hours of programming for HBO as part of the deal.

The HBO pact is part of a larger plan to turn the site--and the Or Die Network's group of sites--into "premium brands" in their respective fields, CEO Dick Glover said Wednesday.

Glover, who became CEO earlier this year, spoke with CNET News.com about the HBO deal and plans for the site.

How did the HBO deal come about?
It is related in that all of the various participants or whatever at HBO or Funny or Die have had a variety of business dealings over time, including Gary Sanchez Productions (a company operated by Ferrell and Funny or Die co-founder Adam McKay), which is doing a show called East Bound and Down for HBO, a weekly half-hour comedy. So a meeting was set up of a bunch of people including Mark Kvamme from Sequoia, including people representing various folks that are part of our company. The purpose was literally just to brainstorm and talk at the core. What people like was we perceive ourselves as the premium comedy brand. They're clearly the premium television network. The idea is: what could these two things, which have that in common...what more could we do that expands on that.

(It) did not seem to take advantage of our voice and assets to just do a television show--we didn't see where that raised the bar. Let's do a deal where the Funny or Die sensibilities can be brought to television, out of just this short-form area to a long-form area with HBO, and leverage that to potentially other businesses and things. And in order for that to happen, we have to have HBO be a strategic partner.

The exact nature of the programming is still to be determined. First thing we need to do, and we're busy at work, is hire a very high-level creative manager for the whole thing and start to come up with ideas.

Can you talk about the finances?
We don't, but what everybody has said is it is small. We didn't need money but did a second round of financing in December. Cash wasn't the issue. The issue was strategic relationship.

How is traffic to Funny or Die going? I know there was the initial huge rush with "The Landlord" video. How do you keep traffic coming back after that?
We've been averaging 3.2 million unique (visitors per month). We clearly have that huge swell of "The Landlord" and then that audience over several months tapered off not illogically. And the last couple of months, audience has been growing. And the one thing we say is, if your first movie was Star Wars, you're always going to suffer by comparison. If you started at zero and after a year had grown to 3.2 million and continuing a nice growth pattern, you'd be thrilled.

How big is the company now?
All of Or Die Networks, which includes Shred or Die (an action sports video site) Eat Drink or Die, (a community site aimed at foodies) PWN or Die (a gaming site), and we're launching in Brazil next month and another site in the fall, it's 42 people.

How will the content be integrated with the existing site and with HBO.com? User-generated content is a big part of Funny or Die. Will that be part of the new programming?
It starts on the television service--the 10 half-hours, which could morph into 8 40-minute blocks, or back-to-back half-hours five times. The basic metric is 10 30-minute television programs. And those programs will reflect the same kind of inventiveness or voice and tone that is Funny or Die.

Anything that is part of the Web site and part of what we do can be a part of the television. Now again it hasn't happened yet, so I don't know exactly how. But an important part of our Web site is getting all these people to submit content that might be tied in or integrated. Yes, absolutely.

Cross-media distribution with us and HBO is anticipated. Clearly, Funny or Die the Web site and HBO.com are players in all of this.

What's the long-term plan? Do you see yourself as becoming a studio or a production company?
We clearly do see a vision of moving toward the 21st century comedy studio model. We really do look at it as becoming much more than a Web site or just a video content company. We think that model evolves, but we see opportunities. We've already done touring, and we will be doing much more in that area. We see the potential of print. We see the potential in audio. This is the logical next step as we seek to exploit.

The long-term plan is to continue to grow brands from the Internet video content space that can then live as multimedia brands--and if all goes well, that each of those can be a dominant brand in their field. So someday the goal is that Funny or Die is clearly the premium comedy brand, regardless of media.

Reading about Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize this week while juggling holiday shopping gave me a severe case of cognitive dissonance about consumption. This feeling intensified today when the viral video The Story of Stuff arrived in my e-mail inbox.

'The Story of Stuff' with Annie Leonard

The Story of Stuff illustrates the consumption chain and aims to reframe our conversation from unlimited production and consumption to sustainability and equity. The video is quite engaging, and I was impressed by its simplicity and effectiveness. No flashy graphics or sensational techniques, just simple line animation accompanying a 20-minute video lecture by sustainability expert Annie Leonard.

The story of this project is an interesting case study of viral video. Leonard has more than 20 years of experience studying factories and dumps around the world--giving her deep knowledge of sustainability issues, but not exactly a visible platform to launch a movement. Enter the video: according to Leonard's blog, The Story of Stuff has been viewed by more than 100,000 people since it was launched last week.

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.

In a move that will certainly strike fear in the hearts of creative ad agency employees, a major advertiser has created a new television ad using nothing but viral video from YouTube, MySpace and other such sites.

Fast food company KFC has turned to user-generated content, also known as UGC, to advertise that its food has "0 grams of trans fat per serving" but with "the same great taste." Why bother paying ad agencies to come up with a fresh idea for a commercial, along with writers, actors and filmmakers, when you can just grab free video off the Web that has nothing to do with the product or company but which might be entertaining?

In KFC's ad, you've got break dancers twirling upside down on the sidewalk, a toddler bouncing in a baby swing, guys being goofy and pumping the air, wedding reception footage, random women dancing at home and, in the one product placement, someone blowing candles on what appears to be a cake inside a KFC bucket. Now that's a lot of talent! The ad is scheduled to debut during American Idol Tuesday night.