Well, the day has finally come. A video on YouTube has finally topped 100 million views, and for better or worse it belongs to Canada’s pop princess, the pride of working-class Napanee, Ontario: Avril Lavigne. The video for her song “Girlfriend” is now at about 110 million views, well ahead of second-place holder Justin Laipply’s “Evolution of Dance.” The fans over at Avril’s BandAids forum are no doubt celebrating, since the record is the culmination of a viral marketing campaign cooked up by the site. First, BandAids came up with a YouTube “view-o-matic” page, which loaded the Avril video every 15 seconds. This cheat was picked up by dozens of media outlets — including yours truly, in a post at my Globe and Mail blog, which got linked to by Perez Hilton (watch those servers melt!).

Alas, it later turned out that BandAids knew YouTube would — as its policy states — block the IP address of its automated viewer page after 200 consecutive views. Embedding for the video was also eventually disabled, although it’s not clear if that was YouTube’s doing or something Lavigne’s label did. In any case, what the fan site was really after was publicity for the video, which it got in spades. As a post at BandAids detailed, the resulting PR helped push the views of the video closer to 100 million every time a story was written about it.

The detail-oriented will no doubt point out that another video hit 100 million views before Avril’s: a homemade music video for the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy’s hit “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex,” which was used in an Apple iPod commercial, hit 112 million views earlier this year. The video was eventually removed from the top-view leaderboard by YouTube, however, after a controversy over manipulation of the viewer numbers (something Andy “Waxy” Baio looked into in depth), and the clip was later removed by its creator. All of which means Avril stands alone at the peak of YouTube viewerdom, which will eventually make her millions.

I’m not sure how many people noticed, but Clive Thompson — one of my favourite technology and science writers — returned to blogging this week. Clive writes regularly for the New York Times magazine, and his most recent piece was an excellent look at Twitter and the phenomenon of “ambient awareness” that such social-media tools allow, and why that’s a good thing. Clive’s blog Collision Detection used to be a treasure trove of those kinds of observations, drawn from scientific journals and various news articles, and after seven months of absence (which he says he will explain later), he is back to blogging.

In analyzing and describing complicated things, Clive has a great way of humanizing things as well, often with just a simple turn of phrase. Take one of his more recent blog posts, about a study of how flies avoid the fly swatter when you’re trying to kill them. First, Clive describes how he returned home from vacation to find his house full of flies and how frustrating it was to repeatedly miss them, and then he describes what the study says about how to avoid this problem:

→ continue reading

Even if you don’t spend a lot of time on FriendFeed, it becomes apparent after not too long that Andrew Baron — the co-founder of Rocketboom, the pioneering video-blog starring Joanne Colan (and formerly starring Amanda Congdon) — has a real hate on for Jason Calacanis, the diminutive and self-aggrandizing founder of Mahalo and former founder of Weblogs Inc. The latest eruption was a post from Baron noting that Mahalo’s traffic seems to have flattened out, according to a graph that he included from Compete.

Baron says: “Can you imagine trying to pretend like your business is successful when it’s not, and then going on to give advice to other people about how you do it?” This isn’t the first time the Rocketboom founder has made such allegations: a post earlier this year made the same point, and drew a comment from Calacanis to the effect that “we had two record months in the past four and August — the slowest month of the year — looks like another record. Not sure why compete shows flat, but it’s sample based. Also, note that compete is only US traffic…. only 60-65% of our traffic is US. so, we’re well over 4m uniques a month.”

→ continue reading

This video more or less speaks for itself. Base jumper Hans Lange jumped off a mountain in Norway in a specially-designed winged suit, but towards the end of the freefall his parachute failed to open and he plunged down the mountain towards the rocks and lake below, until a tree broke his fall. He recorded the entire thing on a helmet-mounted camera.

Google’s birthday is coming up — although it’s not clear exactly which one, or when it will actually occur, for a whole pile of reasons — and it occurred to me that the company must have done an awful lot of searches by now. After all, the most recent estimates I’ve seen are that Google processes more than 2 billion searches a day, although I have no way of knowing whether that’s true. So I started looking around for numbers and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Here’s what I came up with (please keep in mind that I am an English major). If anyone can shed any further light on this — or fix the math — I’d appreciate it. Obviously, I had to make assumptions about what the average number of searches was during a year, based in some cases on nothing but a single number for that year, and I’m sure there are numerous other gaps of logic as well. Feel free to let fly with the suggestions, but try and remain civil.

→ continue reading