The Tammy NYP phenomenon

I popped on to Technorati yesterday to search for something or another and noticed that there were a host of links relating to “Tammy”, “Tammy NYP”, “Tammy download” and “Tammy video”.  So, like lots and lots of people, I clicked on the links only to be drawn right down the rabbit hole into a kind of Asian sex video Wonderland.  I did a little digging to find out who this Tammy person is and found the following description on Elliott Back’s site:

Who is Tammy? She is a student at Nan Yang Polytechnic in Singapore, whose cell phone was stolen by rival cheerleaders. The contents, containing sexually explicit images and movies, were uploaded onto the internet.

For a while Tammy dominated Technorati and some or all of the search terms I’ve repeated above could be found in the biggest search terms for quite some time as you can see from this screenshot Elliott posted:

Anyway, there are links all over the place to this hot new sex video and I have yet to actually find the video itself (which leads me to wonder whether it really is out there or was invented to boost page rankings.  One of the sites I linked to turned into the first of a series of links to other sites promising the video and which, in turn, simply linked to another site.  One enterprising blogger has created a Tammy blog on Blogspot which should be pretty profitable as soon as he/she inserts some ads (provided Blogspot stays up long enough).

According to Capital Region People:

“If you have noticed after 2 days, the number of pages created for Tammy just jumped from 11000 to 360000 in just 2 DAYS. Wow, people are trying desperately hard to earn money.” George is no doubt referring to things like AdSense, although I don’t know how much money anyone could make on a blog with a shelf life of 4 to 7 days.”

I wonder how successful these efforts have been notwithstanding the clear viral nature of this phenomenon.  An ordinary Google search on “Tammy” and “Tammy NYP” doesn’t yield any links to the sex video in the first 30 links (although I was introduced to a Spanish American stripper named Tammy Moreno).  This would seem to suggest that the phenomenon has pretty much died down or Google just isn’t ranking those sites very highly.  On the other hand a Google Blog search turns up a few results (some suggesting the whole thing is a hoax).

What I do know is that the only thing I have seen is a lot of blogs talking about this video (all four parts of it), offering links to download it and ultimately yielding nothing.  Just another passing craze?  In your quest to found out bear in mind the caution posted on Brrreeeport that some of the downloads available may contain harmful worms and other nasty creepy-crawlies.

Update:

I have received 11 hits since I posted this post about 1 hour and 20 minutes ago.  How is that for a potent thread?

Technorati Tags: capital region people, elliott back, hoax, sex video, tammy, tammy download, tammy hoax, tammy nyp, viral themes