By Chris Johnston
April 29, 2006

THE stars are desperately ordinary but also, in their own way, and within the greater context of all this, extraordinary. The website is called Gidol — at googleidol.com — the latest internet cult to go around the world. It is basically an online lip-syncing contest where people mime to their favourite songs.

The site, which emerged only last month, is based in Brisbane but the shameless contestants come from everywhere — Holland, Germany, China, Switzerland, Japan, Argentina, Norway.

So far, Gidol has had a million visitors, who vote on the submitted home-made music videos. In the Gidol Hall of Fame — their big winners — are a pair of cute young Dutch girls, Pomme and Kelly, both 15, who simply stare down the barrel of their lounge room webcam in Amsterdam and pretend to sing Aretha Franklin's Respect.

The girls' own website got 500,000 hits in two months. They've graced the front page of Dutch newspapers and were quizzed by the Los Angeles Times.

Then there's the hilarious — and very knowing — Back Dormitory Boys, from China, doing As Long As You Love Me by the Back Street Boys. They are three young Asian guys in matching orange adidas tracksuits belting out the tune from a Shanghai bedroom, but mocking its excruciating earnestness at the same time.

They've been hired by Pepsi as the faces of a new advertising campaign — and herein lies the key. Gidol is more than a fun internet craze. It's a prime example of what the experts call "consumer-generated content", where ordinary folk either usurp the big corporations and advertising agencies or are used by them to spread a more believable, spin-free message.

Brisbane's Ben Petro, 27, created the site. He works in IT for a Queensland university. "I don't want people to think there's some big corporation running this," he says. "Because there's not. It's just me. But I understand that, say, Sony might come out with a Sony Superstar or something but hopefully, by then, it'll be old news."

Mr Petro says within two weeks of his site getting up, there were about 20 "rip-off" sites copying his idea.

"Sites like googleidols.com, googleidol.net, googlesuperstar.com," he says. And he also knows he's feeding a fad. "I'm not sure how long it will last. It is a fad, there's no doubt about that."

The idea came from an offshoot of the monolithic search engine, Google, called Google Video, which hosts videos from sports matches, TV shows, movies, music as well as those submitted by individuals.

He grabbed four lip-syncing videos, including the Dutch girls and the Chinese guys, built a website called Google Idol and put them on it, asking for net-surfers to vote for a winner. Within two days, the site had around 100,000 hits and he knew he was on to something. People began sending their own submissions from all around the world. Also on day two came an email from a Google executive congratulating Mr Petro on a good idea and offering support.

It could have gone the other way. Google could have prevented him from appropriating their name. Instead, according to Melbourne internet trends analyst Sandra Hanchard, from Hitwise, Google Idol became "one of a growing number of third-party websites to provide consumer-generated content based on Google services. Google Idol refers 20 per cent of its traffic to Google Video.

"Google Idol has been launched at a time when online users in Australia are really embracing websites that allow them to share and review consumer-generated content."

It also appropriates the reality TV idea of the Idol franchise, where every-day people try to sing their way to stardom.

In a significant expansion of its consumer-generated content, Mr Petro is now branching the site out into making actual music videos, for commercial release, by real bands. He would ask for submissions of people lip-syncing to the song, then edit them together. The first, in progress now, is for an indie-rock band called the Motorettes, from Newcastle in England.

"The exposure here is limitless," he says. "The site is so popular because it gives people exposure that they could never imagine. It's taken off because of that entirely. People can very easily sit down for five minutes in front of their webcam and enter themselves in a competition and suddenly a few days later they've got 30,000 votes from people all around the world in countries they can't even pronounce. This site can reach millions."

Source: The Age