Last week, British students protested hikes on tuition, not by forming Facebook groups or making a hashtag into a trending topic, but by actually taking to the streets. Now, in a move that blends the new with the old, that group of protesters has a viral video to pass around. A 15-year-old student eloquently and passionately explains that his generation is not post-ideological, and that they’re not going anywhere. See the video after the click.

Data is great, but if you don’t know what you’re looking at, it’s not very useful. Hans Rosling has been among those combating this problem with innovative data visualization, presenting captivating data visualization images at, among other places, some of the most popular TED talks. In this video, his first live animation, he presents data on health and wealth for the countries of the world in the past 200 years, demonstrating the emergence of the western gap and how it could disappear. It’s incredibly engaging, and an example of how to take what could be dry stats and make them into something exciting. Check out the video after the click.

In the wake of this week’s arrest of Julian Assange, irate “hacktivists” have taken to attacking the websites of a number of businesses that have frozen or terminated Wikileaks accounts. This week, the websites of MasterCard and Visa have both gone down to denial of service attacks. The group that purports to be behind the attacks, “Operation Payback,” isn’t new: they’re a group of Anonymous users who have previously mobilized over The Pirate Bay, ACTA, and other perceived affronts to free speech on the internet. Here, their promotional video gives a little explanation of their background. See the video after the click.

You’ve got to hand it to Wikileaks: if nothing else, they’ve managed to stay pretty constantly at the top of the news cycle for what seems like months now. This video, a Wikileaks rap song targeting everybody from Bill O’Reilly and Donald Rumsfeld to Julian Assange himself, was made before the Cablegate release—a simpler time, evidenced by Assange’s cameo in the video. Watch the video after the click.

Josh Bernoff ist Vizepräsident und Principal Analyst bei der Unternehmensberatung und Marktforschung Forrester Research (bekannt durch die Autoren des Buches Groundswell). In einem 10minütigen Video-Interview erklärt er seine Auffassung vom Kontext zwischen Social Media und Change Management….

Admittedly, the timing of this video’s release is suspicious: a mash-up of a film right around its BluRay release date reeks of viral marketing. If it’s real, though, it’s cool: in four and a half minutes, you see four layers of dream in the various speeds as they unfold in Inception. If you haven’t seen the film, this may constitute a “spoiler,” but mostly it will just be incomprehensible. See the video after the click.

Never underestimate what an inspired group of hobbyists can do. It may not have been easy—heck, it may not have been legal—but flying a camera mounted on a remote control plane through New York City, over the Brooklyn bridge, downtown Manhattan, and right through the spikes on Lady Liberty’s crown, sure looks like a lot of fun. It’s impressive footage, and all the more impressive for coming from an amateur group that gives the directions to replicate their flight right in the video description. Watch the video after the click.

High speed cameras (the kind that shoot slow-motion video) almost always provide an interesting perspective. Whether you’re seeing the violence of an apple being torn apart by a bullet, or the surprising complexity of a balloon popping, one can obviously take in a lot more in slow motion. What makes this video, Glide, so interesting is that the frame of reference is reversed: it’s a high speed camera capturing slow motion video from a moving train pulling into a platform. Just a simple reversal of perspective, but it ends up creating an incredible short video. See the video after the click.

4chan’s /b/ board is a place of great notoriety around the web. It is unarchived, anonymous, and moves at a frenetic pace, which seems to be a perfect recipe for not only the creation of funny, popular memes (things like rickrolling and LOL cats started there) but also some of the worst, most vile and inappropriate content and interactions around. In the past day, though, things there have gone from very weird to even weirder, as the site’s creator, moot, seems to be taunting the whole community with this odd pudding commercial. It’s apparently a real commercial from Japan, and it’s oddly mesmerizing, but there’s no explanation yet for why it’s all of the sudden at the heart of one of the strangest communities on the web. See the Giga Pudding commercial, and risk humming the theme song all day, after the click.

Obama’s reaction to the recent outcry over TSA “gate rape” scandal hasn’t been especially colorful. Certainly not as animated as the California man who memorably threatened TSA agents with arrest if they “touched his junk.” But this is 2010, so not only can we imagine Obama having a bit more outrage, but we can make it happen, and we can make it happen musically. See the music video of Obama’s best speech that never happened, “Don’t Touch My Junk,” after the click.

A supercut is a special class of online video that takes very short clips from many sources, often dozens of films or TV shows, and cuts them all together to demonstrate a common theme, phrase, action, or device. Nicholas Cage, one of the finest actors of our time, is not immune. In just a few minutes, one can see Mr. Cage freak out almost non-stop, artfully and expertly, across a career in film. See the video of Nicholas Cage losing it after the click.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t think it got sillier than reading through rap star Kanye West’s Twitter feed. But then the internet has to go and show me that it can always get sillier. A new video series shows children re-enacting some of the greatest hits of Kanye’s tweets, and the results are hilarious. Watch the most recent episode, featuring some of Kanye’s deepest thoughts, after the click.

Angry Birds is dangerous. It’s a simple physics game available for both iPhone and Android, and has become legendary for how addictive and time-consuming it can be. In this video, taken from an Israeli comedy program, peace negotiations between the eponymous Birds and their arch-enemy pigs are taking place. Watch the video after the click.

The Microsoft Kinect, a new camera attachment for their Xbox 360 gaming console, has been wowing critics in the weeks since it’s been introduced. How are the games for it, though? In this video, our intrepid researcher, in the name of science, attempts to play a Kinect-enabled racing game without moving a muscle, and he does pretty well. Is this an example of a new technology that still has some kinks to work out, or just another example of the decreasing difficulty of new games? Watch the video after the click.

This weekend, in the latest indicator of a building resistance to runaway airport security, a national “Opt Out Day” was announced for 24 November. Participants are encouraged to opt out of the enhanced scanners–dubbed “naked body scanners” or “porno scanners” by opponents. The Opt Out day has already gotten coverage from all corners of the online media, and more videos will almost certainly keep rolling in in support of the action. Watch a video parody of the TSA that predates Opt Out Day by a few months, after the click.

Chalk this one up to “Friday Fun.” Lip sync videos are one of the more bizarre segments of the world of YouTube. A regular person stands in front of a camera, usually in a bedroom or basement, and just lip syncs a song. That’s it. Somehow a syncer named Keenan Cahill’s videos have gotten so popular he’s become something of a celebrity for it, and in his most recent video, the rapper 50 Cent appears to sync along to his own verse in a hit single. He doesn’t show up for almost a minute and a half, so you can really get a feel for how odd the video is without him. (And then when he does show up, how odd the video is with him.) Watch the video after the click.

Google’s much lauded 2009 Super Bowl ad, “Parisian Love,” told a life story through Google searches. People’s search history can still reveal plenty, but it’s likely that today people are broadcasting more information through Facebook. In “A Life on Facebook,” one man’s story is told entirely through his Facebook wall. Watch the video after the click.

OKGO, the reigning champion of viral music videos, are at it again with their latest tune, “Last Leaf.” Unlike some of their previous endeavors, this one is animated, but it still reveals way too many hours spent getting everything perfect. A toast to the boys of OKGO! To jam out to the latest OKGO video, just follow the click.

The television show Mad Men’s ascent to popularity has represented the television industry seriously taking sides. In an era where collaborative creation and universal distribution are both buzzwords and reality, they’ve come up with a show that glorifies the top-down, here’s-what-to-think advertising industry of the 60s. Even Mad Men isn’t safe, though, from fan culture: witness this amazing live mash-up of its theme song with the song “Nature Boy” made famous by Nat King Cole. Watch the video after the click.

Many internet mash-ups are amateur affairs. Interesting, yes, and sometimes high quality, but usually operate in a totally separate sphere from the “professional” stuff. Last year, a mash-up artist named Pogo, who made audiovisual mash-ups of Disney cartoons, caught the eye of Disney. Instead of just shutting him down, they added him to the payroll making promotional videos of new movies. Those videos, like the one for Up, were good, but didn’t have the same heart as his earlier work, especially the classic Alice. Now, though, he’s finished his year of service, and is back in action with “Wishery,” made of bits and pieces of the 1937 classic, Snow White. Check out Pogo’s mash-up Wishery after the click.

This is just too cool. A guy named Jonathan Guberman rigged up a typewriter to not just output text from a computer–which would have been a very neat printer–but also to accept input. That means not only can it print, but it’s the coolest ever tool for playing interactive fiction. Check out video of the Automatypewriter in action, after the click.

A new way to interact with fiction from Jonathan M. Guberman on Vimeo.

Last weekend, Daily Show host Jon Stewart teamed up with Stephen Colbert to put on a rally on the national mall in Washington D.C. Some critics thought they had gone too far, crossing the line from comedy to real politics, but the 200,000+ attendees seemed to enjoy themselves. Stewart gave a final, inspiring speech to cap off the event, and what do you know, the Gregory Brothers have autotuned it. Check out the autotuned version of the speech after the click.

I posted a video on Friday demonstrating the internet’s power to celebrate feats of human awesomeness. And sure, that happens sometimes. But more often, the internet is the home to the concept of “FAIL,” where any time something goes wrong and there’s a video camera around, that failure is cataloged, viewed, and mocked endlessly. Check out one guy’s “Fail compilation” for the month of October. There are some injuries, and a little bit of foul language, but it’s hard to make it through the whole thing anyway.

Many viral videos that catch on seem somewhat mean-spirited, in a lauging-at-you kind of way. Witness the ur-viral “Star Wars Kid,” or Miss Teen South Carolina’s famously nonsensical answer. Every once in a while, one comes along that’s just a celebration of the fact that, you know what, people are awesome. Check out the montage of awesome people after the click.