09:42 PM PDT on Thursday, June 29, 2006

By JIM KLOCKOW / KING5.com

SEATTLE – He’s a self-confessed bad dancer and an amateur videographer, but Seattle resident Matt Harding earned his 15 minutes of fame doing just those things.

And after he did it once, he got a sponsor and did it again in.

From Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, to Mutianyu, China and dozens of places in between – some breathtaking, some not -- Harding can be seen flailing his arms and legs like Charlie Chaplin.

Now just weeks after his return June 2, millions have watched the resulting video, which can be seen on this Web site, his own site and those of other video sharing sites, including the increasingly popular youtube.com, where it has spawned tributes and parodies.

But this is more than just a guy dancing in front of his own camera. It’s a peek at what’s to come in the strange frontier that is now online video where it’s possible for almost anyone to make a video and distribute it the world over for virtually nothing.

Harding’s second trip around the planet happened courtesy of the makers of Stride gum who were more than happy to pay for his travels. Their logo can be seen popping up occasionally in the video.

The sponsorship makes the video is an odd hybrid between a quirky, beautiful, personal story and an ad.

“The first one was a goof and I think a lot of people sort of enjoyed the amateurish nature of it,” he said. But some are suspicious of the second one, he said, thinking it’s a form of gorilla marking.

It is not, Harding says, preferring to call it a “premeditated lark.” If the quality of the second one is better, he says, it’s because he worked much harder on it.

Still, “There’s no way I could have done this trip without the help that I got.”

The story starts in 2003 when at 26, Harding was living in Brisbane, Australia doing what he’d always wanted to do: Play and design video games.

courtesy Matt Harding

Seattle resident Matt Harding dances on a salt flat in Bolivia during the opening sequence of his "Where the Hell's Matt" video.

But he’d also been doing it enough that he had a hankering to get out from behind his computer screen for a while. He took money he’d saved and began traveling.

Somewhere into that trip at the suggestion of a friend, Harding began shooting video of himself dancing and then sending them home as a kind of video journal of his travels.

When he put them together after getting home, he found something new.

“It turned into more than the sum of its parts. Strung together, it kind of did something and when I put the music on top of it I thought, “Oh, wow, this is really neat.”

Harding uploaded the clip to a Web site and not long after that it was discovered by some bloggers and interest in it took off. That generated media attention, which got the attention of the makers of Stride gum.

“They approached me and said, ‘would you be interested in doing it again, for us?’ and I said ‘will you pay for it?’ and they said ‘sure’ and I said ‘yeah!’.”

The popularity of the video is not the only thing that has been unexpected. Among the scores of emails he receives daily in response to the video are some that complain about how their country is portrayed in the 5 seconds or so it is pictured.

“It’s very difficult to make a 5-second representation of any country,” he said.

Some in Guam are not happy that there are junk cars in the background of his shot there and a few Canadians have felt snubbed at not being included at all.

The Norwegians are happy, but that’s about the extent of the regional attaboys.

“I get a lot more ‘why didn’t you dance in my country’ or ‘why did you dance in such a crappy place in our country’,” he says.

The authorities at the Parthenon in Greece, however, didn’t wait that long, and insisted on the spot that he delete the video of him dancing there.

On balance, however, he said the reaction to his efforts has been very good.

“The reception the video has had has been overwhelming. If the attention weren’t so positive, it would be pretty scary.”

What’s next?

“I have no idea. I just got home and I’m looking forward to just loafing around and watching TV for a while, because I’m due.”