The Contagious Media Showdown competition aims to see which viral videos attract the most web traffic and the most links from blogs - in short, what constitutes "viralness". Some 84 entrants, from the wacky to the bizarre, are participating in the contest, which runs through June 9, writes MediaPost. The contest sponsor is Eyebeam, a nonprofit that studies new technologies and media arts. Its spokesman said the contest is intended to determine what kind of virals Web-goers could come up with, and the common characteristics of content with very high pass-along rates.

Pete Blackshaw, cofounder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, is quoted in the MediaPost piece as saying that the contest has demonstrated the difficulty of predicting consumer reactions to virals. "You're dealing with the curious black box of consumer emotion," he said. "For all the practice…we still never quite nailed the secret formula of consumer emotion. It's elusive and it acts in weird ways."