Over the last few weeks, I’ve been passively looking for the identity of the Afro-Ninja. I posted a $50 question on Google Answers, but it didn’t turn up anything for several weeks.

Tonight, I finally got an answer! Edward Shen informed me that it was Mark Allen Hicks, a stunt man auditioning for a Nike commercial with Allen Iverson and Jim Kelly.

Edward works with people who know Mark, and one friend saw him come out of the audition “pissed off with a bloody nose.” Looking at his IMDB photographs, it’s clear this is the same guy. Compare for yourself.

Now, can someone get me in contact with Mark? I’d love to ask him some questions about the video.

In the last few days, Mazda started a new viral marketing campaign in the unfortunate style of “Raging Cow.” Take a look at HalloweenM3, a Blogspot weblog supposedly written by a 22-year-old New Yorker named “Kid Halloween.” (Update: The blog was taken down, see details below.)

With little effort, it’s clear this was designed to promote the new Mazda3 model. The clues are obvious: links to videos featuring the Mazda3 (here and here), the HalloweenM3 username, and rich media hosted at Rackspace, an expensive dedicated hosting provider. Plus, Mazda has tried the viral marketing thing before.

But this is the most half-hearted attempt at viral marketing I’ve seen, especially in light of recent web efforts like the elaborate I Love Bees and Be More Chill campaigns. Four entries in a Blogspot blog isn’t very impressive.

One interesting point is that this entry claims to have recorded the Mazda commercial off the Manhattan Neighborhood Network public access channel, and several seconds of MNN footage are edited into the beginning of this video clip. I wonder how MNN would feel about being exploited for commercial use by Mazda. (I e-mailed them to find out.)

Thanks to Witz.org for the tip.

Update: Autoblog has some thoughts about the campaign.

October 22, 2004: The blog was taken down! Fortunately, Yahoo has a cached copy. And you can still view the user profile and videos.

The blog world is freaking out about Jon Stewart’s incendiary appearance on CNN’s Crossfire today, in which Jon calls hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala “partisan hacks” that are reducing the level of political discourse in the country. (Here’s the complete transcript.)

My friend Phil was quick to post the complete appearance on his BitTorrent server, and my other friend Leonard is hosting the direct download. (It’s good to have friends with lots of bandwidth.)

Watch the video now, and watch Leonard’s bandwidth graph skyrocket! The 36MB WMV looks and sounds great, so don’t bother downloading the 97 MB version.

So I noticed these incoming links from Technorati, all of which appear to be from automatically-generated Blogspot weblogs. They all appear to steal entries from a legitimate Typepad weblog, The Last Minute. I’m guessing this is another attempt at gaming search engines, but I can’t figure out the details. Take a look at the sites and let me know if you have any theories.

http://digitalvideo.blogspot.com/

http://digitalvideoediting.blogspot.com/

http://appleg5.blogspot.com/

http://homestarunner.blogspot.com/

http://thelastminute.blogspot.com/

http://ipodjack.blogspot.com/

(I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to help promote their Pagerank.)

Update: The creator of the cloned sites contacted me… He was experimenting with techniques for improving the Pagerank of his own website. He now understands the problems with this sort of cheating and promptly took them all offline.

It may not be Episode 3, but the Star Wars Kid makes a cameo in Tony Hawk Underground 2. (Thanks to Dan Beckett for the tip and original video clip.) Update: Here’s a high-quality video of the appearance with audio, thanks to Erik:

tonyhawk_starwarskid_high.wmv (WMV, 5.5MB)

Here are instructions for finding him, courtesy of Travis Ogdon:

“On the Boston level if you ollie through the glass windows on one of the buildings (it’s one or two to the left of the one where Ben Franklin is hiding) you land in a living room with a flat panel tv on the wall. If you stand in front of the TV Ghyslain gets up and shouts something about watching Star Wars (which you’re now preventing). Hitting O (on the PS2) will result in him showing off his moves.”

October 13, 2004: Joe Ford confirms that you can unlock the “Geeky Kid” character by beating the all goals in all levels in Easy Mode. They don’t refer to him as “Star Wars Kid,” which indirectly answers the question about whether he was compensated for his likeness. (He wasn’t.)

October 14, 2004: The THUG2 SWK video was featured on G4TechTV’s Screen Savers show yesterday. Erik has the video of the Screen Savers appearance. No mention of my site, and they mistakenly assume that Ghyslain was paid for his appearance. Tacky!