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Today is National Hug Day, a recognized holiday in Canada, Australia, Germany, England and the United States, where it was first established in Cairo, Michigan, in 1986. On NHD people get together and hug: they hug at home or at work, hug in the streets, hug old friends, hug family, hug strangers, hug enemies. It’s [...]

We love listicles that bite off more than they can chew. Arguably this is the case with all lists, but it’s especially true of something so hotly contested and culture-spanning as viral videos. Heavy does an okay job keeping everybody happy with their listicle of the Top 10 Viral Videos of the 2000s dwnload avatar [...]

As Know Your Meme explained to us a relatively long time ago, one-take video have a special viral appeal and optimum meme compatibility due to their impressive displays of synchronization and the creative endurance that makes a one-take video possible. Appropriately, with the recent success of the Université du Québec à Montréal students’ viral vid, [...]

We’re pretty fond of nifty and creative ad campaigns, even insidious viral commercials that pretend to be something else. We especially applaud the innovative thinkers and crafty designers who make such things so seamlessly realistic. That, in turn, means it’s an awful shame when all their efforts go to waste, as seems to be the [...]

Our good friends over at Urlesque recently dropped a bomb of a listicle whose repercussions we’re only now beginning to perceive. Their epic listicle of The 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos has eaten up several of our afternoons already, and we’re finally starting to notice some conspicuous omissions: Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” video imitations, anything related [...]

Remember the T-Mobile ad that deployed Improv Everywhere in London’s Liverpool Street Station? What about Honda’s The Cog ad that really was copying video artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Way Things Go? It didn’t take companies long to figure out the incredible branding possibilities of viral marketing. eGuiders gives us the full story [...]

Part homage, part aesthetic piggy-backing, “in the style of” ads are pretty popular in the era of viral copy-cat trends. Two recent such commercials hit it big over the last few days, generating buzz by borrowing a well-known style and applying it to something new, funny and (often) inappropriate. To illustrate how multinational corporations and [...]

Our good friends at Urlesque called our attention to an excellent vidsticle recently posted by FLIX to celebrate the Jewish holiday Purim. Though it may technically qualify as workplace abuse (especially involving a presumably unpaid intern as it does), we can’t help but admire the creativity and inventiveness that went into re-enacting these 6 YouTube [...]

Contrary to wait you may think, dear skeptical reader of web ephemera who is nonetheless obsessed with said web ephemera, behind every supposedly silly YouTube clip of a kid or a cat there’s a profoundly resonant message. Brendan Lopez of eGuiders demonstrates as much with his 20 Viral Videos as Inspirational Posters. We’re ordering framed [...]

If there is one thing that can be said with certainty about the Internet it’s that anything that gets posted to the web will likely outlive the insects who have survived the Nuclear Apocalypse. That’s why, starting today, The Daily What will begin forcibly retiring viral sensations whose time has come – for the good [...]