Back in the spring of '05, a curious new product began popping up in blogs and then in mainstream publications such as Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Observer and Australian Cosmo. Forget Me Not Panties, a line of women's underwear with a built-in global positioning system(GPS), was advertised by its creators as a way to keep track of girlfriends, wives or daughters. It was an instant hit. The product website, forgetme notpanties.com, noted it was sold out. Close to 2,000 people put their names on the waiting list. Companies such as Target, the giant U.S. department store, clamoured to distribute it.

It would have been one of the most successful product launches of 2005 -- if there had been a product. But Leba Haber Rubinoff and Katie Marsh had created the website as a hoax. It was an entry in the Contagious Media Showdown, a competition run by New York art/science non-profit think tank, Eyebeam, which offered a US$2,000 prize for the site that gained the most traffic in a three-week window without using paid advertising.

Haber Rubinoff had come up with the idea for the panties while at New York University, as part of a satiric project updating the chastity belt. "We would never want to design and sell panties with GPS," says the 29-year-old Vancouver native. For her and Marsh, the site was a humorous way to get people talking about gender. "Initially, our intent was to make people kind of angry, get a passionate response," says Haber Rubinoff. "We thought we were going to get a lot of women and feminists who were upset, but in fact a lot of the women who emailed us wanted to have a male version of the panties." The duo, who call themselves the Panty Raiders, won the competition -- and garnered mass amounts of press. "People wrote about us without doing a lot of research," says Haber Rubinoff, noting that most articles have talked about the panties as if they were real. "If you just Google us you'd find out that we're part of a competition."

The competition was set up by Eyebeam's Jonah Peretti, who is interested in how -- and which -- ideas spread virally across the Internet. He credits the "bored-at-work network," people who surf for strange Web content and email it to friends. "The criteria seems to be, when people hear about it they need to tell other people about it," Peretti says. "They forward to friends, it gets linked on a blog, a reporter reads the blog and writes something, and then all of a sudden it snowballs."

For him, it all started with "the Nike email." In the winter of 2001, Peretti went on the Nike site that lets customers design their own shoes. He ordered a pair with "sweatshop" written on them, which led to a series of emails with a customer-service agent who said that word wasn't appropriate. Peretti posted the exchange on the Web and emailed it to 12 friends just to make them laugh. Within two weeks his inbox was clogged with responses from strangers. He was being interviewed by newspapers across the country and debating a Nike executive on the Today show.

His next project was the Rejection Line, a website that listed a phone number which, when dialled, delivered this message: "Unfortunately the person who gave you this does not want to talk to you or speak to you again. We would like to take this opportunity to officially reject you. If you want to hear from our comfort specialist, Press 1. If you want to hear a sad poem, written by a kindred spirit, Press 2 . . ." This time Peretti was interviewed on TV and radio as a "rejection expert." "After hearing stories about people using it in ways that were gross," he says, "I started to feel that I wanted to do things where I care more about the issue."

Enter the Contagious Media Showdown, an exercise in truth, buzz and media manipulation. The runners-up included the hilarious Crying While Eating, a series of Web videos of people doing just that, and Ring-Tone Dancer, a set of videos of a masked man in a leotard dancing in public spaces to the sound of a cellphone ringing. Peretti holds workshops bringing together experts in contagious media -- "the pro-corporate and anti-corporate and the artists and the hackers." It was after attending one of these that the Panty Raiders hit upon the hoax model. "It was right on the border, believable enough that people thought it was true," says Peretti. "That's very effective."

Initially the Panty Raiders were the underdog. But then they were noticed by popular blogs such as College Humor and Fark and the search engine Excite. Since the contest ended, in May, they've had over a million unique visitors. The win has inspired them to make a joke version of the underwear to sell. And they're dedicating themselves to guerrilla-style, mostly Web-based projects with a feminist twist. Their slogan is "Don't find us, we'll find you." Keep a close eye on your inbox.

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