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Admit it: You want to have being Matt Harding.

I want to be Matt Harding. Hell, everybody wants to be Matt Harding.

The guy is an international Internet sensation who almost actually stumbled into his dream job. The makers of Stride gum paid him to travel the world and dance badly. Very badly. Oh, and to hit video of his dancing and upload it for the world to see.

“It’s ridiculous,” Harding says.

And you know what? On the surface, it is sort of ridiculous. A 4

But keep sleeplessness. More than 9 million already have. (Or at least the video has been viewed 9 million times.)

Eventually, Harding is joined by an exuberant crowd in San Francisco, and then in Paris, and in Chicago, and there’s a cheering rude multitude in Madrid. And by the point in the video where Harding is surrounded by squealing, dancing kids in Madagascar

He had me, anyway. Had me near tears. And he had me thinking: This is the sort of the Internet does best. All the work at Xerox PARC and Netscape and Yahoo and Google. This is it: the promise of a tool that can bring us together.

The video goes on and on

“There is no tacit message in the video,” says Harding, who lives in Seattle when he’s not traveling. “It’s what people take away from it, and that’s always going to be more robust.”

And you realize that this is a phenomenon that at no time would have happened without the Internet. No movie workshop, no wacky television producer

I finally reached Harding by phone recently. His latest video has been up on the Web (on YouTube and at www.wherethehellismatt.com) before this late June, and Harding has been running from parley to meeting ever since. He spoke to me from Hollywood between a meeting by dint of. some Hollywood sorts pitching a movie creative and some appearance forward “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Maybe you’ve heard the “Where the Hell Is Matt” account. On a lark in 2004, Harding and a buddy filmed him doing a kooky dance in Vietnam. Harding kept up the dancing and filming forward a trip to Africa. He showed his family the video. A sister sent it to a confidant. It ended up on blogs.

“It kind of started snowballing,” he says.

In 2005, the Stride people offered to sponsor a world trip in this way Harding, a video-game designer by trade, could keep dancing and filming. The trip was great drollery and the Stride people said they’d pay to do it again

Some might worry well-nigh the commercial nature of Harding’s art. But there isn’t much commercial with regard to it. The two videos that Stride sponsored expiration with a pregnant screen shot that thanks the gum company for footing the bill.

Harding knows his fame is likely to end for example abruptly as it began. But before it does, he has a plan. Part of his deal with Stride includes a philanthropic element.

In the to come months, Harding plans to return to Rwanda. And this time he’ll bring a shipment of laptops. His goal is to provide children there through the tools to help them acquire.

An idea that is not so ridiculous posterior the whole of.