The second coming of Weird Al, on utube.com
Video may have killed the radio star, but the Internet is reviving Weird Al Yankovic. Thanks to the triple threat of MySpace, iTunes, and YouTube, Weird Al's parody single "White & Nerdy" has now made it to the # 9 spot on the Billboard Top Ten. But who cares about the Billboard Top Ten? The Detroit Free Press reports that "White & Nerdy," a spoof of Chamillionaire & Krayzie Bone's hit "Ridin'," is the fourth most downloaded song on iTunes, and it has been viewed well over a million times on YouTube in the last month. Meanwhile, Ars Technica notes that Weird Al now has 213,000 MySpace friends -- and all this after he told Reuters he had "kind of written off the chance of ever having another hit single."
Armies of new YouTube fans may be music to Yankovic's ears, but they're a pain in the neck for Universal Tube and Rollerform Equipment Corp., a company with the unfortunate Internet address of www.utube.com. It seems many YouTube fans, no doubt hunting for Weird Al, are typing "utube.com," and they're wreaking havoc on the Ohio-based company's modest server setup. "It's killing us," said Ralph Girkins to CNNMoney's Chris Zappone. (68 million hits might cause problem for your site too.) What's a nice midwestern company to do? Well, Universal Tube has decided to sue YouTube for trademark infringement - this according to the The Utube Blog, which exists to cover all things YouTube. Confused yet? That's exactly Mr. Girkins' point. 
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