Rick Astley who's now in his 40s once was a popular singer and songwriter who came into some fame in the late 1980s with chart breaker songs like "Never gonna give you up" or "Together Forever". Of course that was over 20 years ago and he has since pretty much fallen into oblivion (at least where I live). So why is it, that some of his music videos, particularly the video to "Never gonna give you up" are getting a lot of attention on YouTube again? It's called "Rick-rolling" and it's another one of those Internet phenomena that are incredibly hard to explain.

Rick-rolling goes like this: Let's say, you're a regular poster on the official Britney Spears fan club message board. You would then find an interesting thread and create a new reply, something like "Man, that Britney Spears sure has let herself go. Check out these new pics of her doing her grocery shopping in the nude." Of course people will click that link. But if they do, they will be treated to the musical genious of Rick Astley and not to the fading beauty of Britney Spears. They might be disappointed, they might even get mad at you, but that's all part of the game.

In my continuing attempts to lighten up my workplace I have now taken "Rick-rolling" to the next level. The idea is to trick your co-workers into clicking links that ultimately lead them to the "Never gonna give you up" music video. The fun thing about this game is that it becomes increasingly difficult because your co-workers won't fall for the same tricks twice. Needless to say, we're all having a blast and best of all, nobody gets hurt.

It all started pretty simple: I used TinyURL to masquerade the YouTube link and emailed it to a colleague using the subject line "Check out this cool website". Of course that first email required some explaining, but once my colleagues had understood the concept of "Rick-rolling", the real fun could begin.

The next thing I did was to hack a website we're currently working on (that runs on our internal test server) so that one particular page would display a fullscreen version of the video after a 5 second delay. I then emailed a link to that page to a colleague telling him that I believed there were spelling mistakes on it. He opened it, tried to locate the mistakes and was then surprised by Mr. Astley's brilliant dance moves.

This was when things got really sophisticated: I wrote a little PHP script that would send emails, seemingly coming from my bosses email address (Only do this if the people in your office are up for that kind of stuff. This could get you into trouble.) I would then send my colleagues emails like "How long would it take us to do something like this?" along with a masqueraded link to the music video. Of course they all fell for it and got a good laugh out of it when they realized that I had sent them those emails.

The next one I actually felt kind of bad about afterwards: One of my colleagues is a freelancer and as such, he receives job offers from all sorts of companies. I sent him an email, telling him I worked for Hop2 (Another URL shortening service, but I told him it was a mobile communications company) and that I was looking for someone to make a Flash website for me. Of course I used a fake email address an a fake name and I gave him a download link, where he allegedly could download the specifications for the website. Again, he fell for it but I felt bad for getting his hopes up like that.

My latest and greatest trick involved an automated system a colleague uses to inform himself about runtime errors in his projects. Whenever an error occurs, he receives an email with a detailed description of that error. All I had to do was forward one of these emails to myself, modify the error message and send it back to him using a fake sender address. The error message I came up with was "Error, too many redirects in 'http://someurl' on line 5" where "someurl" was an HTML page I had previously placed on a test server and which played four versions of "Never gonna give you up" simulatenously. This one almost didn't work because apparently the error reporting system had been flooding him with messages recently, but ultimately he opened the link, laughed and then congratulated me for my trickery.

So if you work in a cool company and you want to play a harmless prank on your colleagues, try "Rick-rolling" or if you're not into that kind of stuff, check out these hot pictures of Britney Spears.