I’ve seen two performances of The Lord of the Rings in Concert, which is great fun and has been at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in previous autumns. But not this year.

But next year — and the year after that — I can renew my Hobbit habit. Yesterday the trailer for the first of two films based on “The Hobbit” hit the Internet. This one will be called “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and will be in 3-D. It will cover roughly the first half of the J.R.R. Tolkien novel that predates the “Lord” trilogy, and includes the finding of the ring that’s central to the later story. Also there’s one surprise: The trailer sure makes it look like Gandalf and Galadriel are, or once were, an item. I sure don’t remember that from the books.

We here at AllThingsD have been paying close attention to the progress of these films, hanging on every video-blog posting by famed director Peter Jackson. (And if you haven’t seen them, they’re very fun to watch: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.) I don’t think I’m the only member of the team that has a Hobbit habit. But I’m probably the only one who will admit it.

Anyhow, here’s the trailer. Enjoy:

But even though the world’s biggest video site is on a mission to upgrade its content to include more “premium” stuff, there’s plenty of it on the site right now. It’s just that you have to know where to look for it, and a lot of it is only going to appeal to a relatively small group of people.

Here, for example, is a full-length biography of physics genius Richard Feynman. Given that it doesn’t appear to be uploaded by the BBC, which made the show, I’m not quite sure if it’s supposed to be there. On the other hand, it appears to have been up on the site for a full year, and has attracted thousands of views, so presumably the Beeb could have had it yanked if it wanted to. (YouTube, by the way, used to have a 10-minute limit on uploads, in part to prevent people from playing entire movies on the site. But it dropped that requirement a while ago.)

No big takeaway here, other than these two things:

• If you’re at all interested in modern science, and have an hour and a half to spare, this should be on your list.
• There’s lots of other stuff like this buried in the 48 hours of video per minute that users upload to the site. You just need someone to point you to it. In this case, that would be the excellent Maria Popova.

Meanwhile, YouTube users seem very happy to do what they have always done on YouTube: Watch weird clips of people and animals behaving oddly.

The site has published its list of 2011’s most popular videos, and they’re basically what you’d expect: Clips of cute dogs, and cute babies, and an annoying 8-bit cat, and a really cute cat. And, of course, Rebecca Black, the poor/maybe rich girl who may or may not be in on the joke. Probably not.

The surprise, if you don’t pay attention to this stuff, is that YouTube’s Top 10 most-popular list of 2011 isn’t really the site’s Top 10 most-popular list. It’s the list of the top 10 videos not put out by big music companies.

Because those clips, which are distributed by Vevo, the Hulu-for-music videos, are way, way, way more popular than anything else on the site.

The most popular music video of the year, for instance, is this Jennifer Lopez clip, featuring Pitbull. It’s at nearly half a billion views, which means it is likely more than 2x Rebecca Black’s clip, the top non-big-music-label clip.

In fact, it turns out that any clip featuring Pitbull does exceptionally well. Here are two more, which collectively have generated close to 400 million views. I’ll let much smarter people, like Maura Johnston, explain why Pitbull is so popular. For our purposes, the key takeaway here is that people really, really, really like watching music videos on YouTube. Even more than they like funny girls and cute cats.

Visible Measures says it has attracted more than 1 million views since last night. I can tell you with almost clinical precision that his debate gaffe occurred around 10:18 pm Eastern time, because it was all over Twitter as soon as it left — or didn’t leave — his mouth.

Still, it’s not Perry’s biggest Web video hit (yet). Visible Measures reminds us that his first big campaign ad racked up more than 2 million views earlier this fall.

Meanwhile, for ad/tech/biz types: Note that the moment occurred on CNN’s broadcast, but YouTube attributes the bulk of the views to Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed, which got the clip up with alacrity. [Ugh. As Ethan Mandel notes, this was actually CNBC's broadcast -- easy enough to spot had I been paying attention -- and now CNBC has removed this particular version. Still easy enough to find on YouTube, though.]

On my way, I ran into a group of Koreans who were line dancing for what appeared to be no reason at all. I’m told it had to do with the local mayoral election, which at that time was just a couple of days away.

I’m not sure what it was meant to signify, but I will say it was a lot more fun than getting handed a pamphlet. In any case, it seems to have worked, as the party being backed by the dancers — the liberal opposition party — saw its candidate, Park Won-soon, win the election.

Indeed not, as two chatbots get up in each others’ business.

The upcoming movie from Justin Timberlake — who starred in “The Social Network” playing hyperactive entrepreneur Sean Parker and who recently was part of a group that bought Myspace — is also techtastic.

In the futuristic film “In Time,” Timberlake plays a man who must steal time to live longer. It feels a little like “Logan’s Run,” but with better clothes.

Timberlake, who is also a singer, is trying to leverage the good notices he got from the Facebook movie to a more wide-ranging Hollywood career.

Enjoy:

Okay, Hollywood has apparently made a movie from the classic Hasbro game “Battleship.”

But instead of plastic pegs in a board, it’s chock full of special effects, aliens and a lot of explosions.

Yes, aliens. It’s a long way from B1.

Here’s the teaser trailer:

Which makes it odd that this day-old clip from Funny or Die, which gives Twitter the Ken Burns documentary treatment in honor of its fifth anniversary, hasn’t exploded already. Because:

• It’s about Twitter.
• It’s got the Twitter seal of approval.
• It also has an endorsement from Perez Hilton, who also appears in the thing.*
• It’s actually quite funny, too.

I’m sure it will get there, though. Enough words. Watch!

(Oh. Not totally safe for work. There are some swears.)

*Not my demo, either. But he’s very popular. Different strokes.

So here’s a new one: Same cool stunts (to my eyes, at least). More exotic locations. And it looks like it will be a hit, too. Helped by a push from Boing Boing, it’s gathered more than two million views in the last week.

And, as Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth points out, it’s also an ad, paid for by Red Bull.

That won’t be entirely clear to most viewers, since the words “Red Bull” don’t show up until the end of the seven-minute-plus clip. And also because the folks at Google’s YouTube have plastered the video with overlay ads for products that are not Red Bull’s.

But the Red Bull people are apparently okay with that, since letting Google run an ad on your video is an opt-in decision.

…recently begat this much more popular viral video, which eventually turned into a hit song at Apple’s (APPL) iTunes:

But here’s the full backstory, via the “Auto-Tune the News” guys behind the whole thing. They told their tale at Google’s (GOOG) Zeitgeist conference this week, impressing at least one high-profile attendee.

And if you’re a little uneasy about the notion of hipster Brooklyn kids turning someone else’s real-life crime story into a novelty song, I hear you. But the Auto-Tune dudes say they split their iTunes sales with unintentional star Antoine Dodson. So we’re all good. Right?

Still, there are ways to increase your chances of making stuff go viral. Or at least improve the performance of stuff that is going viral.

That’s sort of the premise behind BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti’s New York start-up. Last night, Peretti put on a presentation that was half sales pitch and half how-to guide for aspiring viral-content makers. You should click through the whole thing, which is quite entertaining and embedded at the bottom of this post. Sample:

Note that some of Peretti’s presentation focuses on how the Huffington Post maximizes its traffic. That’s because Peretti was a co-founder (or early hire, depending on who tells the tale) at Huffpo, and crucial to setting up the site’s tech-savvy strategy.

Many people still think of Huffpo as a political site fueled by celebrity bloggers, but the site’s real recipe for success is its focus on real-time traffic analysis. Huffpo doesn’t talk about this much in public, but slide No. 18 gives you an idea of what the site is doing.

And, because Peretti knows what he’s doing, these slides are almost certainly going to become a Web pass-along. The Jews vs. Mormons analogy he starts on slide No. 29 pretty much guarantees that.

Jonah Peretti Viral Meetup Talk

Here’s yet another spoof of the trailer for “The Social Network”–a.k.a. The Facebook Movie–subbing in Twitter as the villainous Web 2.0 company.

It’s called “The Twit Network,” and it is very funny.

Best line: “I need to create a way to blog that is as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall.”

It follows a spoof trailer on YouTube called “The Video Website,” which includes the wonderful line “The keyboard cat wants more money.”

Enjoy until the next one (along with the YouTube one and a spoof of the Facebook Movie trailer about Facebook):

“I hope that little motion-picture destruction…gets picked up virally,” said Harley Lewin, partner at McCarter & English LLP, who represents Louboutin on intellectual property issues. An observer working with Mr. Lewin shot the footage in China, after a seizure of fake merchandise by the Chinese Administration for Industry and Commerce.

The website, www.stopfakelouboutin.com, marks a stark change in the way luxury brands are addressing the problem of fakes.

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A few notes:

• Toyota has been doing variations on this theme all year, including a Super Bowl spot. You can see them all on the “Channel” page Toyota has set up on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. But none of them have caught on like this clip.
• If director Jody Hill’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s one of the guys behind the excellent Eastbound & Down. If you haven’t seen it, you should. (Saatchi & Saatchi gets credit for the whole thing).
• So here’s the thing: I’m pretty sure I’m at the bull’s-eye center of the target demo for this one. And it makes me feel warm about Toyota (TM), unintended acceleration or no. But I’m still not buying a minivan. Yet.

Conjuring up references to 1970s cult classics like “Shaft,” Just-a-Band’s latest video, “Ha-He,” introduces the fictional Makmende sporting shades, chains, an Afro pick and what appears to be polyester. Directed by Jim Chuchu and Mbithi Masya, the clip is a tribute to “ass-kicking” of days past–even the name “Makmende” is a throwback to a word used in mid-1990s Nairobi to connote a know-it-all or local hero (and bully.)

The video–with “Big-G,” “Godfrey and the Laydayz,” “Black Sahara” and others backing up Makmende–has drawn more than 24,300 hits in the week since its release and the success doesn’t end there. Kenyan bloggers and Tweeters have seized on the video and launched a campaign for the man they’re calling Kenya’s very own Chuck Norris–complete with one liners about Makmende’s superhero skills and prowess. Makmende on Facebook has already collected 19,200 fans–with more joining by the minute.

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The conglomerate’s music division doesn’t represent much more than a footnote in its overall financial picture, but in the last quarter, it was at least a positive footnote. Sales were up two percent–seven percent if you cancel out currency fluctuations–and operating profit was up 8.2 percent.

Hard to argue that this uptick will be sustainable, though. Sony (SNE) says the boost came from a couple individual success stories that will be hard to repeat, for obvious reasons: People bought lots of copies of the soundtrack to “This Is It,” the Michael Jackson concert movie, as well as the debut album from cultural oddity/viral video favorite Susan Boyle.

Looking for more traditional music business news? I can oblige: Music industry types tell me they’re freaked out that physical sales could take another steep tumble this year if retailers like Wal-Mart (WMT) and Best Buy (BBY) shrink the tiny amount of floorspace they devote to CDs yet again. And they’re also worried that digital sales are finally flattening out.

We’ve all seen it, that spiro-graphed, color-splotched invitation to Apple’s Jan. 27 event at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Weekend Update isn’t on the inside, but we hear rumors that Jobs will storm the stage dressed as Moses, carrying the new tablet, which will be made of stone, under his robes. Apparently, that’s where it’s been hiding all along. Either that, or Weekend Update is going a little nuts from “tablet fatigue.”

Before we got to rumors, plans and all important educated guesses, AllThingsD spent the week doing reporting about real companies with products you can actually buy.

Walt’s column wasn’t exactly its normal, gadgety self this week. Maybe he’s saving his strength. Instead of the newest thing that won’t be leaving your pocket, he covered a service that claims to help you remember everything. Evernote, with its adorable little elephant logo, aims to be a sort of digital filing cabinet in the cloud, allowing you to save information, images, notes and just about anything else that can be digitized. Walt had good things to say all around, even if the available apps didn’t give every device the same functionality. Weekend Update liked the auto text-recognition feature that makes pictures of text searchable. We’ll never carry a business card home again. Neither rain nor snow nor tablet rumors can keep Walt from his appointed rounds at Mossberg’s Mailbox, and this week he grabbed a couple questions about e-readers, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer 8 and the right laptop for the young and litigious. Walt cleared up the myth that e-books can’t highlight text (even if they don’t do it in color yet), and then moved on to a question about what IE8 refers to as “accelerators.” Before tying up the mailbag strings for anther week, he also gave counsel to a future counselor. He recommended a moderately priced Windows 7 laptop or a Macbook for the incoming law student, though he suggested it would be a good idea to check with the school and current students for specific needs. Weekend Update thinks that last bit is extra good advice. Katie was busy this week testing the latest Bluetooth earpiece from Aliph’s Jawbone line. The Jawbone Icon is the first earpiece to run with a software package that allows the addition of apps just for the earpiece. Overall Katie thought the Icon represented a step forward for Bluetooth earpieces but hopes for upgrades to the app suite will bring more robust features. Oh yeah, and she was glad that they finally got rid of those tricky hidden control buttons.

At MediaMemo, Peter gave us the continued saga of e-magazines and the world’s slowest moving electronic construction project. It looks like the Time Inc. e-mag prototypes won’t be part of Wednesday’s Apple (AAPL) event even though there was a lot of hullabaloo over the company’s Sports Illustrated prototype. Condé Nast, on the other hand, has declared its GQ mag-as-app tests a success. No word yet on who will be three-quarters naked on the first 10-inch screen edition. Completing the out-with-the-print, in-with-the-electronic trifecta was Peter’s post about the New York Times pay-wall announcement. The Times claims it will erect a metered wall in 2011, which seems like an awfully long time in the shifting sands of the Web. Outside partners may be playing a factor, and some speculate that the 2011 date is just a declaration that New York Times Company (NYT) will be waiting-and-seeing. Peter doesn’t see what that would accomplish and cites experts who assert that a year isn’t an unreasonable amount of time to build a complex pay wall with necessary features.

Digital Daily was on the ball this week with John’s signature hard-hitting hilarity. His early report proved correct when sources suggested that the EU’s approval of the pending Oracle (ORCL)-Sun (JAVA) acquisition was nigh. Not to leave the tablet news out in the cold, John asked some important questions about a future tablet’s data consumption habits, and thinks it might end up in a class of its own. A big, beautiful screen means big, beautiful images and video, which mean gloriously huge file sizes. Hooray for Wi-Fi. To round out the week, John covered a story about Google (GOOG) co-founders Larry and Sergey planning to sell about $5.5 billion in stock over five years. We’re not sure whether the proper term is “cashing out” or “cashing in,” but they are going to be doing a lot of one or the other. The stock sale will remove them as a two-man majority voting block, but their remaining 47 percent will assure that their velvety duet will continue to ring clearly at board meetings.

Boomtown led off with some viral video for the ages. Jimmy Fallon one-upped the “pants on the ground” video by performing the sarcastic ballad as Neil Young. We’re not sure the audience caught that it was Jimmy right way, in part, because Young was making the TV rounds about that time, and in part, because Fallon does a surprisingly good Neal impression. Kara asked her readers to vote on the new tablet’s name, making “iPad” her own prediction. Kara has an eerie way of getting this stuff right so Weekend Update is gonna go ahead and get that tattoo this weekend. Kara finished the week with a quick post about her trip to Sundance and all the geektastic happenings there. Kara’s Winnebago, which we call “Operation Rolling Thunder,” was crammed full of wife, kids, mom, dog, and maybe a few stowaway Bay Area indie filmmakers who tied themselves to the undercarriage. Read the post; there’s never a dull moment on a Swisher expedition.

AllTingsD is back on Monday with some great new stuff to feed that techie habit. And don’t forget to set your homepages here Tuesday (as if they weren’t already) to see live photos and blogging from Apple’s big unveiling. We’ll see you there, and will be sure to let you know if Jobs does, in fact, part the Bay in his walk from Marin to San Francisco that morning.

Also, it wouldn’t hurt if you got it on national TV. And if you got YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley to give you a shout-out on Twitter.

Still, this Jimmy Kimmel clip of a duet with Norah Jones has been on Google’s (GOOG) video site for five days now, and it has racked up a mere 57,468 views. Go figure. I like it, anyway:

Alas, I don’t think this year’s version is nearly as entertaining. But Susan Boyle fans, who include at least one of my bosses, may get a kick out of it.

Also, people who like watching Web darlings like Xobni, Mint and Get Satisfaction try to warble along. By the way, anyone want to tell us what “stealth” company Swipely is up to? Looks credit cardy.

First Round Capital 2009 Holiday Card from First Round Capital on Vimeo.

On Monday, the closely held Denver fast-food chain launches the contest on ToastyTorpedo.com, where visitors will be able to submit photos or videos over the next four weeks. Quiznos said it’s looking for demonstrations of customers eating one of the $4 subs “in an unusual place or while doing an unexpected activity.” The winner will also be determined by public votes and announced August 3.

“We believe social media and interacting with our consumers in this way is really important to our brand and is in many ways, the wave of the future,” said Trey Hall, Quiznos’s marketing chief. “And who doesn’t love a viral video?”

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The video, “I See,” developed by boutique ad firm Taxi New York, features a MoMA visitor (played by Meryl Streep’s son, Henry Gummer) looking with boredom at a sculpture while listening to an audio guide.

He becomes more interested as the narrator says: “The sculpture you are looking at drew ridicule and shame when the artist first exhibited it in 1913. Nearly a century later ‘Symphony Number One’ is considered a pivotal example of abstract sculpture. Your immediate reaction might be to dismiss this work, just as your boss dismissed you after making what anyone would agree was an honest mistake. But if you allow yourself to really look at this piece, you’ll see that it awakens all senses simultaneously.”

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In this week ramping up to the holidays, good cheer–unsurprisingly–was hard to find. 2008 may well be remembered as the year the econalypse stole Christmas.

Yahoo (YHOO) was bereft of cheer, for sure. BoomTown covered its long-dreaded layoffs and published Jerry Yang’s complete memo to Yahoo staff about the painful process, which began on Wednesday. Ex-Yahoos from all corners of the company declared their preferences (and vented) to BoomTown about the as-yet fruitless search for a CEO to replace Yang, who laid himself off last month. But wait–Digital Daily pointed out a singular moment of misplaced cheer–akin to fiddling while the proverbial Yahoo burns–as the company, uh, celebrated the holidays with a bafflingly lavish year-end party last Saturday–four days before its massive layoffs began.

Digital Daily covered a lot more bad news this week–even some for Apple (AAPL). Belkin, historically the largest exhibitor at January’s MacWorld, announced it won’t be at the convention this year. In addition, registrations for the annual Macfest are down 20 percent since last year. Fairchild became the latest in a long procession of semiconductor companies to lower estimates in the face of dwindling demand, and IPO activity dropped 50 percent in 2008, according to Ernst & Young’s year-end Global IPO Update. What’s that word? Oh yeah, schadenfreude. In a cold bit of circumstance, almost any company can feel a little bit better by comparing itself to Nortel (NT), which lost an astonishing 97 percent of its value this year.

MediaMemo wrote about CBS’s (CBS) appointment with the piper–it spent $1.8 billion on CNET last year, and started paying the consequences this week. The re-org of the entire CBS Interactive group is laid out in Quincy Smith’s memo to its staff. Hulu was hurting this past week, too. Its traffic dropped sharply in the absence of Tina Fey/Sarah Palin viral videos. There was at least one happy anomaly in this week’s news, though: Microblogging site Tumblr brought back memories of the heady early days of Web 2.0, announcing a $4.5 million-dollar round of funding from Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.

On the Mossberg front, Walt is on a holiday break, but Personal Technology is not. Nick Wingfield sat in for him this week with a column about digital projectors, which are getting smaller and more portable. And in anticipation of Mac-themed holidays for Windows PC users, Katherine Boehret discussed reliable methods of getting data from a PC to a Mac.