Amateurs' talent: Giving us a local perspective on the world
THE man in the video is doing some sort of quirky dance in a foreign land, arms flailing and flopping, feet moving as if walking over hot coals. There is nothing graceful or beautiful about the dance. Nonetheless it communicates an infectious joy that defies easy characterization. In short, it is fun to watch.
"It's just something I've always done," said Matt Harding, who created and stars in the video. "It's that dance that kids do when they're 2 or 3 years old.
"I guess I just never stopped doing that," he said.
The nearly four-minute-long video is so captivating that it has been seen online by more than 3 million viewers since it was released two months ago. More than 2.2 million of those folks saw it on YouTube.com, the largest and most popular website for sharing and watching original video content.
Since YouTube was launched just a year and a half ago, it has become the 16th-most-popular website in the world, according to Alexa, a website ranking service. One hundred million videos a day are watched on YouTube, according to the website. By comparison, about 26 million viewers watched the four major networks during prime time on a recent Monday night. The wide availability of broadband Internet connections has provided amateur and professional travel filmmakers with a new medium for the distribution of their work, providing works such as quirky personal videos or hotel promotional spots. The growth in broadband, which hit 102 million U.S. users in May, is up 30% from a year earlier, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
Harding, 29, of Seattle, has achieved a kind of fame once reserved for the stars of traditional media. His first dancing travel video, released in early 2005, was such a hit that he was approached last August by a chewing gum company that wanted to sponsor his next film.
"I had assumed when I made it, it would be amusing to my friends and family, and it was amusing to me," Harding said. "People who have no idea who I am found it a lot more intriguing than my friends and family."
Using his sponsor's money, he embarked on a six-month trip to 39 countries on all seven continents, dancing on video in each place. The video can be found at his website www.wherethehellismatt.com.
There are nearly 150,000 videos tagged as "travel" on YouTube. Because filmmakers decide what tags to give their own videos, many only marginally qualify as travel and the quality of the films varies greatly.
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