YouTube's greatest hit: One man and the web's most watched video

He is clad in dorky clothes, has a physique portly beyond his years, and cannot dance to save his life. In a previous age, Matt Harding would have had little hope of becoming a global star. But thanks to the World Wide Web's insatiable appetite for high jinks, the American video-game developer's geeky dance moves have turned him into the latest internet sensation taking desktops by storm.

Harding, 31, is the man behind "Dancing", a viral video coming to an inbox near you. The clip – type "Matt Harding 2008" into YouTube – lasts just four-and-a-half minutes, but shows the kind of embarrassing boogie worthy of a comedian. It sees Harding repeating his mal-coordinated moves, essentially a Ricky Gervais-esque hand-flapping jitter, in 69 locations around the globe, with crowds of strangers joining in. And people have voted with their mouse-clicks: since the skit was uploaded two weeks ago, it has already risen to the number-one spot in the web's official Viral Video Chart (www.viralvideochart. com ) and has been watched 15 million times on YouTube.

Watch: Where the Hell is Matt?'

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But to describe this as an overnight hit would not quite be true – the film is the result of a drawn-out creative process. In fact, this is the third version. Harding, who grew up in Connecticut, began making the initial clip when travelling in 2003. During the trip, in Hanoi, a friend captured his moves using the movie mode of his Canon camera.

The pair repeated the sketch at all their subsequent stops, likening their efforts to taking photographs for souvenirs. Their destinations included photogenic hot spots such as the streets of Mumbai, a Netherlands tulip field and an Icelandic geyser.

Upon returning home, Harding edited the clips together. At his sister's suggestion, he registered a website, wherethehellismatt.com, and posted the edited clip in autumn 2004. His film was picked up by internet trivia sites such as somethingawful. com and became a smash hit.

The video spread via email, at a time before the launch of major video upload sites such as YouTube. His server began receiving 20,000 hits a day.

Among those who watched him was the American chewing-gum manufacturer Stride. They offered to finance his travels, in exchange for a plug in subsequent films (their logo occasionally flashes up in the top-right corner of the second and third films). The new lifestyle suited Harding, who admits to preferring travelling to work, just fine. "It's one thing I'm really good at," he says.

In 2005, Harding uploaded another video extremely similar to the first, with better sound and camera resolution. This was watched almost 10 million times, with Harding becoming one of the top 30 "directors" viewed on YouTube.

So it was that work on the newest version began in 2006. The crucial difference from previous videos is that other people – children in Soweto, Tokyo waitresses, even a lone military policeman in Korea – are now seen dancing alongside the internet star.

The film features a score composed by Harding's friend Garry Schyman, performed by a 25-piece band, which plays over the lyrics of a poem by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old Bangladeshi living in Minneapolis. Siddique was discovered by Harding's girlfriend, Melissa Nixon, a Google employee, who found her work, appropriately enough, on YouTube.

Various theories exist as to why the video has proved so popular. Some speculate that it is almost the most perfect piece of internet art – "short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content it's open to a multitude of interpretations," writes Charles McGrath in The New York Times – with some internet theorists positing that the work is actually an allegory on American foreign policy. It, does, after all, feature a bumptious foreigner refusing to change his tune, or dance, wherever he is.

Whatever the reasons for his new-found fame, Harding maintains he will not let his internet celebrity status go to his head. He is putting the idea to bed before he is typecast, he says.

"I wouldn't want to make another video unless there was something to say that I hadn't said," he concludes. "I'm going to see if there's something more to be done, but if not, I'm happy with what there is. I don't want to pop the bubble."

YouTube's latest hits

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Human Mirror
Fifteen identical twins form a "human mirror" on a New York subway car. Each twin performs the same actions on either side of the carriage to create the illusion of a "mirror" inserted down the centre of the screen.

Techno Chicken
A chicken raves it up to a hardcore soundtrack and lurid backdrop. Effects employed include lasers and a chequered neon floor. Reminiscent of Justin Timberlake's finest outings.

Charlie Bit My Finger Again
A young boy teases his baby brother and suffers the biting consequences – 37 million hits can't be wrong.

The Trons – Self-playing Robot Band
The future of music? An automated band that look like they have been fashioned from Meccano belt out a tune.