Our 15 minutes of fame

I was thinking the other day about the spread of our Cubicle War video. A couple of things came to mind.

First, there is no single route to reach people anymore. Instead there are millions of routes, all interconnected to a greater or lesser degree with each other. On the one hand, no longer can a single placement reach everyone. This falls in the category of no longer having Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson.

But there is a very positive side to this. Before, if you could not get the single placement. If as a comic you did not get invited to Carson. If a program was not covered in PC Magazine, you were out of luck. Now, there are many avenues to having your work recognized. And it is a much more democratic process. If you create something interesting, it gets posted in various places and then cross posted and will then can show up in the most unusual places.

So for work that would not be seen before, now it will. Maybe not by as many as you would like - but it will be seen.

Second, how it shows up is fascinating. The length of time it is of interest is much shorter nowadays. That is true of everything except stories about Jessica Simpson or Paris Hilton. But it's not just a blip.

My major in college was Physics and the interest is like multiple intersecting waves where there is an initial build up to a large spike, and it then dives down where the interference between the various waves keeps the combined wave small. But then the various waves are in sync again and there is another spike, not quite as large.

What causes this? Well first, most everything operates akin to elementary particle physics if there are enought players involved and in the case of the film you are talking about ½ a million people or more so that holds.

What I think is happening here is that people pass on the link. Many blog about it. And each of those links individually bring more viewers. Some of these links bring more than others and some of these high volume links are posted at the same time. This leads to a jump in people viewing the video.

I think there is also a time delay in some links. People get emails from friends but read them later. They then save that information for an upcoming post they are going to write. On technorati the initial peak was posts of the "watch this" type. However, recently the posts have all been using the film as an example of good viral marketing (thank you). It makes sense that these posts would come later.

But the way the interest follows a composite wave is fascinating. I think we will see research in the future which starts to model this and they will find it is exactly that - the summation of numerous simple wave forms creating the final complex wave. Which raises the interesting point - what does a negative amplitude signify?