Its very exciting to see how far viral video has come. Star Wars kid has now been downloaded 900 million times and this is the best video I have seen of him yet.

I also really enjoyed this video involving a friendly great white shark even though it essentially an advert. But it does show the power of viral marketing - combining video as a technology and email as a distribution method for maximum exposure of a brand and a product/service.

Channel boss Steve North said: "It's now official - with viewing figures like this, virals truly are the entertainment of the future. "The magic combination of hilarity and notoriety means that these vignettes are forwarded from inbox to inbox around the world."

I wouldn't go that far, but certainly virals are an important vehicle within marketing and entertainment as they involve video which has undergone a major boom in the past year (since flash video became mainstream and email which is a cheap and effective distribution channel and importantly used frequently by the audience the advertisers are trying to engage.