"Viral" as noun for 'viral video'

[Mark Mandel]

Where I saw it (first sentence of the second paragraph of the quote):
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/christian-bale-all-the-rage-on-the-web-1604318.html

>>>
Christian Bale: All the rage on the web

Cyberspace is reverberating to the sound of one man swearing. His
expletive-per-minute ratio might pale in comparison with Gordon Ramsay
delivering a verdict on a sub-standard mushroom risotto, but in the
space of five days, Christian Bale's tirade of fury at a hapless
photography director who dared to walk across his line of vision
during filming has been re-posted, chopped up, sped up, layered,
re-dubbed, re-enacted and spoofed so many times that it has secured
its place as the first major internet phenomenon of 2009.

...

The speed at which this particular viral took hold was almost
exhilarating. The incident that sparked it took place last summer, but
it wasn't until last Monday that the tape was leaked, apparently to
celebrity gossip site TMZ.com. Within minutes it had been posted to
YouTube, dubbed over a suitably gruesome still from the film American
Psycho (bit.ly/bale1). By Tuesday morning, the first slightly
unsophisticated audio mash-ups had started to appear; but only two
hours after someone had merely laid the rant on top of the song "Hip
to Be Square" by Huey Lewis (bit.ly/bale2) – another American Psycho
reference – what might be called the daddy of this viral made its
grand entrance. Los Angeles-based DJ RevoLucian wasn't particularly
well known before last week, and he may well slip back into obscurity
next week, but his painstakingly constructed dance track "Bale Out"
(bit.ly/bale3), with its oddly catchy chorus of Bale screeching "it's
f***ing distracting", has had 1.5m views at the time of writing, and
is rising fast.
<<<

Obviously you can't just search for "viral". "Viral is" gives ca.
49,700 rgh, the first 10 of which are

        'Viral' is used to refer to the marketing technique
        not everything viral is marketing
        8 Tips to Make Your YouTube Video Go Viral is a great article
        I think the desire to create something that will go viral is overwhelmin
        In the past I've said that viral is (usually) interactive, funny, useful *
        something viral is afoot.
        Something being viral is not, in an of itself [sic], viral marketing.
        Apparently "viral" is now a new media channel *
        One of the best and most successful methods of implement [sic] viral
is what I call the leech method.
        Viral is the power.

-- none of them clearly nouns (though the title of #5 is "The Greatest
Viral Ever", and #8 is a possible).

So modify the search. "This viral is" gets about 477 rgh, "this viral
was" about 223, and ... WTF???!!: "this viral has" about 486,000!
"virals" has ca. 884,000, topped by "Top10Virals.com - 10 New Viral
Videos Added Daily".

Searching the archives for "viral", the first (most recent) hits have
the medical sense. There are a lot of false positives in a footer, one
version of which is
(http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0708C&L=ADS-L&P=R7391&I=-3)
>>
 See what you're getting into…before you go there
 http://newlivehotmail.com/?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_migration_HM_viral_preview_0507
<<

We have Rex W. Stocklin mentioning "viral marketing" on 15 May 2005
(http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0505C&L=ADS-L&P=R1316&I=-3)

and Kathleen Miller, on 1 Oct 2003
(http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0310A&L=ADS-L&P=R354&I=-3),
quotes Safire's 7-27-03 column w.r.t. "tipping point", which mentions
"viral marketing" as an existing expression.

But neither is a noun or refers to videos. No point in searching any
earlier; 2003 is already way before viral videos. (All right, I know
that's hubris. Who's going to prove me wrong? If Barry were still
around here I wouldn't even have to ask.)

Mark Mandel

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