Clare Werbeloff: Chk Chk Boom!
19-year-old Australian girl Clare Werbeloff has become an internet celebrity after giving a false account of a shooting outside a Kings Cross nightclub to Nine News on May 17.
Clare Werbeloff aka “Clare the Kings Cross bogan” or “chk-chk-boom girl”
“There were these two wogs fighting, The fatter wog said to the skinnier wog: ‘Oi bro, you slept with my cousin’. And the other one said: ‘Nah man, I didn’t for shit, eh’ and the other one goes: ‘I will call on my fully sick boys, eh’. And then pulled out a gun and went [gun-cocking sound] chk-chk boom!” Werbeloff said as she finished describing her encounter.
Once the raw footage was uploaded from Nine’s website onto YouTube, hundreds of thousands of people picked up the video or uploaded their own “video responses” and dance mixes, amongst which a Hip Hop, Club, Shake The Room remix and spread it across their social contacts at the speed of light.
Chk-Chk Boom: The Clare Werbeloff Club Mix, viewed 300,000 times
Werbeloff’s 30-second ad lib has led to job offers, television appearances, radio and magazine interviews across the country, 85 interview requests from the world’s media in a day, a Facebook fangroup “Clare the Kings Cross bogan fan club” with 26,000 fans, over 800,000 views on YouTube and 550,000 on MSN Video, a Kings Cross Shooting meme competition, 40,000 online conversations on Australian blogs, news sites, forums, videosites, microblogs and various other sites, a reference in federal parliament, an offer of a bikini shoot, a thank-you from Aussie troops in Afghanistan for cheering them up and a host of internet entrepreneurs cashing in on the “chk chk boom” craze with a range of T-shirts from $8.50, coffee mugs from $11.99, ceramic beer steins from $13, caps and other souvenirs. And Claire may be casted as the new presenter for a series of pop culture stories.
According to Australian firm BuzzNumbers who tracked the meme, 41 percent of the conversations took place in social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, whilst a further 27 percent of conversations occurred on blogs and forums, and 12 percent on News sites.
The top five influential destinations online that contained conversations or mentioned Clare Weberloff were Facebook.com, Twitter.com, NineMSN.com.au, News.com.au, and InTheMix.com.au.
Also fast food chain Nando’s got inspired, the company aired a new radio spot to piggy back off the Clare Werbeloff “Chk, Chk, Boom” phenomenon. Taking listeners to the scene of a Kings Cross shooting on a Saturday night the ad replaces the term “wog” with “chick”.
Creative director Darren Fishman of The Spere Agency, who created the radio advert, said “Clare has become an overnight sensation appearing on mainstream and social media outlets everywhere, We saw it as a prime opportunity to have some fun with a subject that really appeals to the Nando’s target market.”
An interview with Clare Werbeloff and a quick overview of the viral spread
In an interview with Nine Network’s A Current Affairs the 19-year-old waitress from Sydney’s northern beaches said “It’s been the biggest week of my life. I didn’t think it would blow out of proportion like this and I wasn’t thinking at the time. I didn’t think anything would come out of it, Aussies love to muck around with each other. They love jokes and I just thought Australia would get it. I’ve had fun and I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just a bit of fun, so it will be a good story for the grandkids”
In a well-written piece in The Sydney Morning Herald Miranda Devine explains why Claire went viral: “She was audacious, quick-witted, verbally dexterous, politically incorrect and inventive.”
And also Miranda states “She also was engaging in the increasingly popular sport of “punking the news” – tricking the media into publishing a fake story, which made her a hero for all the bloggers forever predicting the death of the mainstream media.”
In the article Miranda Divine also tries to find the reasons why Boyle and Werbeloff have turned into internet sensations.
She therefore refers to a 1995 seminal article by Robert Hof, entitled The Power Of Us, in Business Week about mass collaboration on the internet. In the article Hof wrote that the “shared knowledge, social contacts, online reputations, computing power” of the then nearly 1 billion people online worldwide made them a “collective force of unprecedented power. For the first time in human history, mass co-operation across time and space is suddenly economical.”
And also she found out that MIT researchers at the Centre for Collective Intelligence have explored the motivations of people, why millions of people spread videos. The motivators: money, love and glory. Love and glory feature much more heavily in collective intelligence systems than money.
Those millions of people who spread the Boyle and Werbeloff videos around must have been motivated by love, Divine argues, which, MIT says, can take many forms: intrinsic enjoyment of an activity, the opportunities to socialise with others, or the feeling they are making the world a better place.
By the way, the victim isn’t happy. The 27-year-old Sydney man is actually upset that YouTube sensation Clare Werbeloff is getting all the attention. In an email to news.com.au, Justin Kallu said: “Im just abit upset about the fact that i’ve been shot and that i almost lost my life and there s this girl all over the news getting popular all because she has no brains.”
Or is it all fabricated stunt?
Source: News.com.au, NineMSN, SMH.com.au, Google, LiveNews, Independant Weekly, Brisbane Times
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Az új internetmém: “Chk Chk Boom” – http://tinyurl.com/lt96or
hi
Be aware she is a liar, see nothing..
http://www.bestbuzz.fr/?s=clare
And what is the next step with this whole fiasco? Thousands of kids all over the world trying to give fake, provocative interviews at crime scenes in the hopes of making it big.
Perhaps it will be the end of crime scene interviews as we know them?
Looks like the crybaby libtards are coming out of the closet all whiny because Clare hoaxed your precious media.
Go Clare!
Media is so wildly corrupt. People have no idea that half or more of their “news” is coming from Public Relations companies. That’s right. Vicious, murderous PR firms that sell Wars, political programs, and bizarre staged passion play events designed to usurp your dwindling freedoms. Can you say Port Arthur?
Let me tell you something truly sick: Manchurian programmers know for a fact that when people are subjected to violence and provocative, repulsive material through media, that they become, by degrees, psychologically traumatized and revert to a highly suggestible state. So what comes right on the heels of a traumatic staged event? More legislation dismantling your political freedoms!!!
People sense there is something truly degenerate about media, but it is not because of Clare Werbeloff. Clare is a breath of fresh air. Actually, she is full of poise. Good for her.
The media deserves no respect. Then someone comes along and hoaxes them. Tough crap. Maybe if they had to actually work for a story rather than simply play a “news” clips produced in a PR studio they would get some respect on the street.
Go Clare!
Down with corrupt media monopolies!
And why shouldn’t Clare get some comedic relief from the sneering tide of “wogs” that flood the streets endangering decent people and their families? Should everyone fall down as if dead, weeping when a brawling “wog” gets a cap busted in his arse?
Go Clare!!!
Clare Werbeloff CHK CHKBOOM GIRL has videos doing funny things at myspace.com/kayomarbilus