popular thinking

MORE FUN WITH WEBSITES: Panties with GPS tracking? Video clips of random people crying while eating? A magazine about bloggers?
Too funny to be true.
But these were a few of the most outrageously contagious Internet sites to appear in the past month, all designed to win a contest proving how the World Wide Web can rapidly spread any information.
Forget Me Not Panties, Crying While Eating and Blogebrity won the Contagious Media Showdown awards over the weekend from Eyebeam, a New York City nonprofit center for art and technology. The contest ran from May 19 through June 9. All 60-odd sites receive free hosting from Datagram through July 15.
Forget Me Not Panties won the $2,000 grand prize with 615,562 unique visitors and more than 20 million hits to the site in 22 days.
The site reputedly offered panties to track your unsuspecting girlfriend or wife, boasting: ``These panties can give you her location, and even her temperature and heart rate, and she will never even know it's there!''
Crying While Eating won two $1,000 prizes while gaining 386,638 unique visitors and more than 13 million viewings of 30-second video clips with, well, people crying while eating.
It began with staged clips, accompanied by helpful one-liner descriptions of the food and the source of the subject's sadness.
Reader submissions have boosted the site to 46 clips. Readers also can vote for their favorites. Yesterday's favorite, Spencer, gnawed on ribs while allegedly bawling because ``his conjoined twin didn't make it.'' Dan, eating pork roast and mashed potatoes while sitting on the toilet, cries because he ``failed to plan ahead.''
Blogebrity preyed upon the egos of bloggers by not only promising a magazine about the online journalists but also ranking them as A-, B- or C-listers. That site won $1,000 for having the most blog links (490).
Other sites featured a masked Ringtone Dancer, a movie about brain freeze and a breakup letter generator. Showdown.contagiousmedia.org lists all the sites.