Puppy Cam Goes Viral

It takes a village of some 4 million to raise six cuddly pups, or at least to ogle them for hours on end.

What began as a way for a San Francisco couple to keep tabs on their pet Shiba Inu dog Kika’s litter while they were at work has become an unlikely Web sensation. Viewers flock to the Internet site Ustream.com to monitor the 5-week-old brood’s growth, watching the energetic pups paw and play with one another and have at it with their chew toys.

Ustream co-founder Brad Hunstable explained how a private dogsitting webcam became a worldwide phenomenon. “It started out in the Ustream offices; our employees found the puppies when they only had one or two viewers,” Hunstable told Holt and Robach.

“We fell in love with them, we forwarded them to our friends and our friends forwarded it to their friends. The next thing you know, mothers were forwarding it to daughters and daughters were forwarding it to mothers. Over 4 million people in the last week have tuned in to watch.”

The universal reaction among viewers is “Awwww...how cute!” as the fuzzy brown look-alike pups live their lives out in a “Truman Show”-like existence. Viewers know the pups by name and by the color of their collars. They include boys Aki (green collar), Akoni (black collar), Ando (blue collar) and girls Autumn (purple collar), Ayumi (yellow collar) and Amaya (red collar).

[Source: msn.com]