The Dark Knight – the latest instalment in Batman films – is perhaps the most successful example of viral marketing ever. Among the many teaser-trailers and other online precursors to the film’s release (July 25 in the UK) was a deal with Dominos Pizza in the US that only showed the trailer to people who had purchased a pizza shortly before.

And now here it is spending a little bit of its huge promotional budget on a small Web series called Kyle Piccolo: Comic Shop Therapist. Warner Bros paid the entire production budget – $36,000 – for the first five episodes of the series, set in Manhattan’s Midtown Comics. Just a thought: surely the show’s target audience – comic-book nerds – will all be first in line to see The Dark Knightanyway.

Fred, a 14-year-old who talks like a chipmunk, is YouTube’s fourth most-subscribed channel. Fred – along with his most popular video Fred Loses His Meds – has suddenly come to the attention of bloggers and while most of us will probably never understand what the big deal is, 270,000 YouTube users can’t be wrong, can they?

June Sarpong, the former T4 presenter, has left the world of pop culture for that of politics. The website politicsandthecity.com is designed to interest young women in politics, and focuses on neatly packaged (if a little girlie) political news pieces, along with fairly inane blogs from June, Lily Cole and soon, apparently, Kylie.

It also has a daily melody section, a gossip site and animated political story videos. A little patronising perhaps, but the pretty, bite-sized packaged packaging is bound to appeal to youngsters previously uninterested in politics.

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