Pop17

June 22, 2008

Matt is back! He’s an internet celebrity for his “Where the Hell is Matt?’ video. Before his rule over internet video he was just your typical British musician who liked to develop video games. He is 32 years old and an internet phenomenon.

His ” video was passed around by e-mail and eventually became “viral”, with his server getting 20,000 or more hits a day as it was discovered, generally country by country due to language barriers, before the launch of major video upload sites.

Harding created a second version of the video in 2006, with additional dancing scenes from subsequent travels, called “Dancing 2006”. At the request of Stride, a gum brand, he accepted sponsorship of this video, since he usually travels on a limited budget.

His videos are viewable on YouTube, Google Video, and his own site wherethehellismatt.com. His second video has been watched 9,604,319 times on YouTube as of June 20, 2008 and Harding’s YouTube channel is ranked “#30 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Directors” as of March 25, 2007.[7] Harding released his third dancing video on June 20, 2008. The video is the product of 14 months of traveling in 42 countries.” - wikipedia entry on Matt Harding

June 19th, 2008

Rex Sorgatz explains how to become an internet celebrity with ease. He outlines simple steps to achieve internet fame in a featured article that ran in New York Magazine.

“It’s easy to be cynical about this new class of celebrity. The lines between empowerment and self-promotion, between sharing and oversharing, between community and cliques, can be blurry. You can judge for yourself whether the following microcelebs represent naked ambition, talent justly discovered, or genius marketing. The point is that renown is no longer the exclusive province of a select few. Nano-celebrity is there for the taking, if you really want it.”