Alyssa Alano would have remained a minor curiosity in the dustbin of Pinoy cultural excreta, otherwise known as Kuya Germs's The Master Showman -- had it not been for YouTube and email. (See Video here)

Her quick rise to notorious fame demonstrates the power of the internet to distribute oddities that would otherwise not make it in traditional mass media.

I received an email about her feat (a link to a YouTube site with a plea saying "Pasikatin natin ang taong ito" -- "Let's make her famous") and in a couple of days, the video of Alano singing Kiss Me was a hit distributed mainly via email.

That's not the interesting part. What hits us in the face is how the internet reversed the flow of content: from email back to TV. The unfortunate event, which was a taping of a mall tour of The Master Showman, would have relegated Alano's performance to obscurity, had it not been for someone (with too much time in their hands) who actually took time to record the performance *and* add subtitles illustrating Alano's mangling of the hit by Sixpence None the Richer.

Within a week, Alano was famous in the websphere and this energy rippled back on TV, prompting spoofs and guestings of Alano (Update: now, Alano is a mainstay in Joey de Leon's show Teka Mona on ABC-5, doing what she does best: murdering the lyrics of English songs). Radio stations rushed back to their archives and started replaying Kiss Me. Clearly, the electromagnetic pulse caused by YouTube + email was too great to be ignored by traditional media and those who would not even dare to watch the Master Showman.

Alano may go back to obscurity but she gained fame beyond what Master Showman may have given her. Expect things like these to start becoming more popular in the future.