UPDATE: I simply can NOT believe the popularity this thing has garnered. I first heard about it, as I'm sure most people did, when a friend sent the link to me with the message, "It's just so cute!" Unless you're on a high-speed line with a fast processor, it a bitch to download, and it has nothing in the way of content -- just a few dozen animated hamsters dancing to a sped-up version of Roger William's theme from Disney's "Robin Hood". (You have no idea how relieved I was to find that out -- I KNEW I'd heard the music somehwere before). It's the kind of thing I'd expect people to visit once, say "how cute," and continue in their never-ending porn-surf marathons. But, no, people seem to keep coming back for more.
Perhaps it provides a zen moment for people. I will admit that there is something viscerally satisfying about a bunch of dancing rodents, but its growing popularity seems to go beyond that. Folks are calling it "the new Dancing Baby," but that wasn't just some cutesy thing, it was a technological breaktrhough -- and one of the spookiest freakin' things I've ever seen.
Perhaps this is a return to the early days of the web when the mantra was, "If you build it, they will come." The site's popularity has spawned a number of parodies, including my favorite, The Jesus Dance, which I'm going to hell just for seeing. Like most web fads, this will blow over soon, but if the populace is so easy to entertain, making my first million may not be as daunting as I had originally anticipated. As for my true opinion of the Dancing Hamsters, I stand by my original assessment: Just because you can build a web site doesn't necessarily mean that you should. I'd be lying, though, if I said I didn't dig the music.