I like his comments about tabloid culture and reality shows. People will act like complete fools anymore if there's fame in it. Yesterday's celebrities and Joe Sixpack will literally eat a bug, if it means being on TV. Or eating a bowl of bugs that someone else barfed up, during sweeps week. Or eating rancid meat all season, in the hopes of winning the grand prize on the season finale. Which turned out to be a year's supply of rancid meat.

There's a good payoff at the end: watch what happens a few seconds after 1:15 - that might have clinched it for this guy.

I was tempted to make a blog post about this (and if this video does poorly - I'd say 50-50 odds, I just might send it there for that purpose), but I thought it was interesting to note that Toronto radio station 102.1 The Edge (CFNY) has yet another contest on their morning show (typical obnoxious morning show thing) - as long as listeners/contestants put the Edge 102.1 the logo somewhere in the vid (this one's just at the end), anything qualifies. Whatever the hosts enjoy most wins the $1000 weekly prize. There's a final grand prize of $5000. Technically anyone on Videosift can participate too.

Check out their contest site for details.

Returning to the topic of this video (the week two winner), they chose it for various reasons, not limited to the fact that the juxtaposition of "Afternoon Delight" with a 'vicious' beating was amusing, and that the guy managed to keep that cigarette in his mouth throughout the entire 'fight'. And he was doing it on a snowy deck too.

What I also found interesting was that overt "viral vids" - like this music vid - didn't win. I'd argue that inserting the station promo and logo repeatedly into the vid definitely hurt it. Sort of refreshing to see the "make free ads for us" aspect minimized, in favour of something more, I dunno, original? Or at least minimally commercial

Another phenomenon, I found while going through a few of the vids is that there are people with accomplished vids (say, a funny re-cut of a movie), who spliced in a 2 second clip of the station logo and then entered the contest. Worth a shot at free cash I suppose - would it be considered selling out though?

This video won it's week on America's Funniest Home Videos ($10,000), then won the grand prize that season ($100,000). A few years later, AFV had a "Funniest Video of All Time" special, and this took that grand prize ($250,000).

Good way to pay for four simultaneous college tuitions.

Ferretting out news first; my past life as a journalist strikes again.

I suppose my grand prize was having the honours of being the first poster - and, for now, having the #1 video... http://videosift.pl/story.php?id=4765

I don't see myself pulling off that coup (#1 vid) around here any time soon... and I won't be surprised to see that vid quickly replaced my something else.

BTW, James, suggestion for the tagline: "The Best of Google Video, YouTube, and the rest of the online universe."

That could probably be tidier, but it's just a thought - a way to preserve the Google Love and reflect reality.