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.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

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.