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"using available data".. available from where? The Facebook API?
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August 2009
watching an audience grow in real time
This is a trifle but I think it's pretty neat - something that we've all seen happen many times in one way or another, but I've never had a chance to document like this.
I was browsing reddit Monday night and I saw two links on the front page that took you to a Twitter account called @shitmydadsays. I'm not going to attempt to improve on perfection so here's that account's profile description: "I'm 28. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says". An example:
"The dog is not bored, it's a fucking dog. It's not like he's waiting for me to give him a fucking rubix cube. He's a god damned dog."
I wasn't alone in finding this perfectly hilarious, because the account had around 25,000 followers when I first saw it around 9pm GMT on Monday. I was a fool then and neglected to take a screenshot, but I amended this on subsequent visits.
By the end of the night the account had been linked to from the front page of reddit and Buzzfeed. With at least two big aggregators linking and people like me passing it along to friends, the number of followers just exploded.
It's fun and weirdly gratifying to watch a literal overnight success in motion. And I'm genuinely looking forward to the next thing his dad says.
UPDATE: My friend Mat Morrison sends along a link to TwitterCounter, which charts a Twitter account's followers. Thanks, Mat!
web culture and hypertextuality
This essay originally appeared in a slightly different form on an internal Ketchum blog called The Alchemist. I'm re-posting it here mostly for convenience's sake, as I'll be using it in a seminar I'm giving next week.
For an earth-shaking phenomenon that is (by some measures) now in its fiftieth year, the Internet has so far eluded attempts at chronicling its history.
By history, I should say, I don’t refer to the technical development of the internet and the subsequent World Wide Web; this is a tale that is explored in a number of fine books and essays, most recently an oral history piece in Vanity Fair that collates the recollections of Vint Cerf and other pioneers who are responsible for the actual thing which is the Web. Theirs is the story of the Web as a technology and as a medium. But the telling of that story (while essential) is not nearly so difficult a task as the packaging and telling of the culture that the Web has produced.
How
does the Web produce culture? It’s an easy shorthand for us to talk
about culture and media as though they were synonymous. Television is
culture. Theater is culture. This shorthand becomes evidently less
useful as we go back in time. Michelangelo’s David is a unit of
culture, perhaps, but no one would be tempted to say the same for the
slab of marble he was carved from. Media are not culture, but the ideas
that travel across them - memes, to use the increasingly popular term coined by Richard Dawkins - are.In the pre-Web world, ideas flitted from audience to creator and back, but not particularly quickly. People turn a line of Seinfeld dialogue into a catchphrase. The Simpsons comment on the state of society - or society as it was when the episode had been written 9 months before. It is this transmission of ideas from producer to audience and back again that is the role of media in the production of culture.
The Web fundamentally changes this relationship. Only a tiny handful of people can publish a major newspaper, but anyone with Internet access can have a blog, or review a product on Amazon, or make a Facebook profile. The Web makes media so accessible to both audience and artist that it blurs the line between the two groups until it vanishes.
Equally important is hypertextuality. Other media can be referential: Raphael can acknowledge the influence of Leonardo by painting him into the background of a canvas. Wilberforce can quote chapter and verse to support his arguments. But the Web is hypertextual, which is to say immediately referential. I may cite your argument to buttress mine, but only on the Web can I offer the reader a link which will immediately take you to it. The hyperlink makes every place on the Web potentially adjacent to every place else. It accelerates the exchange between audience and producer until it is near instantaneous. It creates ambient clouds of data. It also creates an environment of interconnectedness that is unique in media. Leslie Stahl will never close a 60 Minutes telecast by recommending that you watch Dateline NBC for more information. Yet that is exactly what is happening on weblogs, news sites and messages boards everywhere on the Web.
Indeed, the hypertextuality of the Web is inherently understood to be its most important facet. Search engines are the most important properties on the internet, and their entire purpose is to take you somewhere else via a hyperlink. Some of the most influential and widely-read English blogs (such as Boing Boing) are links blogs or (to use Warren Ellis’s term) curators: blogs in which every post is a hyperlinked exhibit, designed to expose you to and ultimately take you to another website.
Hypertextuality is the enduring contribution of the Web to human discourse, but the Web is an impermanent artifact of its age. Any instance of technological advance no matter how seminal eventually is superceded and replaced; we don’t print on Gutenberg’s press anymore, nor do we navigate the oceans with a sextant. If anything, the Web is the most liable to replacement of these, being an ephemeral batch of code. But hypertextuality will be at the core of whatever replaces the Web, and will soon pervade other media, too. Many newspapers will soon be online-only; hypertextual TV is perhaps just over the horizon.
It is this combination of democratic access and hypertextuality that makes the Web the conduit for a unique culture of its own; a Web culture.
I took a class once from the Roman historian William Harris, who was fond of saying that his job was incomparably simple next to the job of future historians. For Harris, having a handful of surviving documents from antiquity that described the same event was a gift. For the historian of the future, drawing conclusions about the 21st century will entail wading through an ocean of blog posts, newspaper articles, and television broadcasts all offering wildly differing opinions on the same subject. The volume of information that the Web publishes every minute of every day will be a boon to researchers of the 23rd century - and the bane of their grad students, who will have to sift through it all.
welcome to fernandorizo.typepad.com.
I run UK & EMEA digital strategy for Cohn & Wolfe during the day, and I make iPhone games with Hard Six Games in my spare time. Nothing you read here is the perspective of Cohn & Wolfe or any of its clients.
You can email me at fdrizo at gmail dot com.
elsewhere on the web
greatest hits
- app store ratings are broken
6 September 2009 - google reader is all the social network that i need
27 May 2009 - web memoriam 2009: memepool
24 March 2009 - my favorite 2009 super bowl ads etc
2 February 2009 - the ditch button: reverse engineering airbus crisis PR
21 January 2009 - sarah palin fights the future
13 November 2008
