Rigging the viral market?

One of my Blogger-Social karaoke conspirators, Paul McEnany, puts the viral odds on this new Weezer video at 8 million views. Personally, I'd love to see the math. Sort of like how they predict box office gross for films in Entertainment Weekly, I imagine. "Let's see, one Chris Crocker + the Numa Numa guy + the Will It Blend idea + some Star Wars stuff, and on and on = oh hell, let's call it 8 million views." And Gavin Heaton's comment to Paul's post is spot on: "If they were really smart they would release a low quality version of the song as an mp3 and allow people to create their own mashups." But they won't because that would make sense.

I'm especially happy to see Minneapolis' own Tay Zonday make his cameo appearance, since he and I had breakfast together a few days before he flew to LA for this shoot.

But there's maybe a bigger idea at stake here. We've created at least the appearance of a machine that spits out viralness, and encourages lunging at the podium. Could there a marketplace for virality? What if you could place bets--wait, let's call them something sensible, like "investments"--on the over/under for a particular "viral video?" I think that might be kind of fun.

(However it works out, the song itself, "Pork and Beans," is actually quite nice. Very Weezer. I'll be downloading it soon.)