THERE are no weekend box office charts for online videos.

But if there were, near or at the very top of the list right now might well be a 41/2-minute video called Dancing, which more than four million people have viewed on YouTube, and perhaps another million on other sites, just over two weeks since it appeared.

It's the online equivalent of a platinum hit, seeping from one computer to the next like a virus.

The title is not misleading.

Dancing shows a guy dancing: A big, doughy-looking fellow in shorts and hiking boots performing an arm-swinging, knee-pumping step that could charitably be called goofy.

The dancer is Mr Matt Harding, the 31-year-old creator of the video, with some New Agey-sounding music playing in the background.

He grins and bounces his way through 69 different locations, including India, Kuwait, Bhutan, Tonga, Timbuktu and the Nellis Airspace in Nevada, where he performs the dance in zero gravity.

He started doing it at work, years ago, when he was living in Brisbane, Australia.

"I'd dance at lunchtime or during an awkward pause or just to annoy people," Mr Harding said.

While on a Christmas Island beach, he has an audience of crabs and, on Madagascar, he performs for lemurs. More often - and this accounts for much of the video's appeal - he's in the company of others: South African street children in Soweto, bushmen in New Guinea, Bollywood-style dancers in India, some oddly costumed waitresses in Tokyo. And they're all copying his flailing chicken-step.

Dancing is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: It's short, pleasingly weird and open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism. Or it could be about nothing at all - just a guy dancing.

However you interpret it, you can't watch Dancing for very long without feeling a little happier.

Mr Harding, who grew up in Westport, Connecticut, has been employed in a video game store as a designer of video games, but he prefers just to travel.

"It's one thing I'm really good at," he said.

Mr Harding collected all the dancing shots from his first trip in 2003, edited them into a video and posted it on his website, wherethehellismatt.com.

The video went up in the autumn of 2004, and quickly became a hit among the people trolling the Internet back then.

That led to Stride chewing gum company offering to underwrite Mr Harding's subsequent travels, virtually no strings attached.

In 2005, Mr Harding released a second video with better sound and camera resolution. In 2006, he repeated the venture, this time with other people dancing along with him.

He said: "Those first videos were something I needed to do for me... The new video pushes a different button - you've got all these different people doing the same thing.

"I remember thinking, 'Wouldn't it be neat if you could capture that'?"