I participated in a panel of "experts" at the launch of the Contagious Media Showdown. Contagious Media Showdown is an experiment in creativity and the seeming random nature of viral content and the way it spreads across the Internet. Take for example the Hamster Dance or Peanut Butter Jelly time -- remember those? There is no formula for why those sites become popular. People just start forwarding them, they catch on, and then before you know it, they are the next big thing. And then they usually die just as quickly.

That's the experiment with Contagious Media Showdown. Can you ask people to create sites that will become shooting stars, and, just as importantly, can a panel of experts predict which ones will hit it big. Here is the list of sites, 84 in all. Link. Check them out and see if you can predict the winner. The sites have only three weeks to become the most popular site, then the contest is closed.

In my case, I was lost. I had no idea which ones would hit it big. It is easier to predict the ones that will go nowhere. But to predict a handful of winners out of 25 to 30 real competitors (the rest will certainly go nowhere) is hard to do. I just kept asking myself, would I forward this to friends or would I blog about it. The answer was universally no, so I was a bit lost. But the contest, on the other hand. It is a perfect example of contagious media. It is interesting, I have forwarded it to friends, and here I go, I am blogging about it. My new prediction: the Contagious Media Showdown is the winner. Traffic Graph Link.

Alexa's #1 Mover today, edging out 1800flowers.com and ftd.com, is Winamp. Yes, Winamp is still around and very popular, ranked 617 in the Alexa global rankings. Winamp just released version 5.09 which drove an impressive surge of customers to their site. They may have sold out to AOL, but that hasn't hurt their traffic. Take a look at their graph: link. Winamp has the most consistent traffic graph I've ever seen... until late last week when the traffic skyrocketed. Frankly I'm surprised that iTunes hasn't taken a big chunk out of their user base.

This Monday Grokker released the newest version of their search app, Groxis. This is a new approach for Grokker which had previously offered Groxis as a downloadable application. The new Grokker is 100% web-based and uses Yahoo to provide search results.

Grokker is one of a handful of visual search applications that came out over the last several years offering an alternative to the Google-style text heavy search results available elsewhere. Most visual search apps organize your search results into categorized groupings of content usually represented by circles.

The upside to visual search is clear when you search for something like Jaguar. Did you mean the car? The cat? Or did you mean the Operating system? With Grokker, you just click the circle that says "Cars" and your results are refined. Try the same search on Google or Yahoo and you will be clicking and typing and sifting more than you'd like.

Grokker is also using Alexa to provide the site thumbnail images. When you click on a site, a pane on the right side of the screen refreshes to show info about the site, including the thumbnail image.

Here are some other visual search engines. They have a lot of neat (if sometimes odd) ideas for how search can be improved. Give them a try:

Grokker
Kartoo
Mooter

Reach history graph of Grokker, Kartoo and Mooter: Link.