Going viral on the Web

Dear Gentle Reader,

The image above is a recreation, sort of like Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, of the Influenza (Flu) virus which swept around the world in 1918.

World War I, the War to End All Wars, had not even ended. It was spring when the first wave of this virus hit.

The 1918 Influenza virus would sweep around the world, essentially in three waves, between 1918 and 1920.

Current estimates of the total mortality from the 1918 Influenza virus are between 50 million to 100 million people (sourced here).

In percentage terms that equates to 2.5% to 5% of the world's population who died as a result of contracting this particular strain of the flu. The infection rate of this pandemic was obviously much higher than the mortality rate, as the disease continued to propagate.

When people talk about "going viral" on the web, they generally do not talk about people dying.

Hopefully they are not talking about their hard drive or their computer dying.

When peoople speak of "going viral" affectionately, they are usually talking about an infection of interest in a thing--an image, a video, a song, a website, a posting, or a download.

On the subject of "going viral" a friend wrote an excellent description which I would like to share.

OxyJen (now nicknamed Toxina) wrote:

For something to go viral on the internet, its content needs to be so compelling that people spontaneously start alerting their friends to it.

The spontaneity is crucial because that next generation of friends must also--independently--judge the content to be so compelling that they spontaneously pass it along.

This effect propagates through countless stages of people who don't know the content provider and thus aren't willing to do him/her any favours. The content itself has to secure their full enthusiasm.

This effect is actually really similar to how books become bestsellers. Marketing and publicity don't sell books (although they get the books looked at in the store, which is very valuable); only word-of-mouth generated by the quality of content sells books.

Your best chance of going viral comes from continuing to provide the best content you can, and continuing to lure people to your blog by interacting in an engaging manner on their blogs (this is marketing), and--if you're looking for a mercenary angle to help things along--choosing topics that are likely to resonate with, strongly amuse, intellectually interest, or emotionally inflame large numbers of people.

Pretty bright person, that OxyJen. She knows what she is talking about. One of her posts had 858 hits in just one day... going viral, that's what we are talking about...

When we read what OxyJen wrote, it is obvious, but also because OxyJen says it so well.

I had never really considered the importance of the spontaneity aspect and the compelling nature of the spontaneity before.

I suspect, after reflection, that spontaneity is also important because if something is so compelling we will spontaneously send it without even thinking through the appropriateness of sending that thing along.

Personally, I cannot wait for OxyJen's first book to be signed by a publisher because I cannot wait to read it. That book will, I am sure, be excellent. So, OxyJen's agent... get selling.

Tschuess,

Chris, Regina, and Pommes (learning to read in anticipation of the happy book purchase)

Short notice

Dear Gentle Reader,

Your Heroine and your scribe are off to Cambodia for a week or so. 

We leave imminently. We are packed and about to leave. 

(Yes, Yes, I'm coming and yes I have our passports...) 

There are postings for when we are away, but I will not be responding to any comments for a while. But comment away... I will respond upon our eventual return.

Tschuess,

Chris, Regina, and a thoroughly put out Pommes who hates the sight of suitcases or backpacks (but hey, he has a very pretty maid coming to tend to his every whim and desire...)

e-contact seen through the clouds

Dear Gentle Reader,

This image is of a cloud chamber used to track and observe the course of charged subatomic particles.

The cloud chamber was invented by a Scottish physicist, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, after he observed spectral (spectre-like might be more appropriate) shadows magnified and cast upon clouds while mountain climbing.

Charles had been working on Ben Nevis, Scotland's (and Britain's) tallest mountain peak in 1894, when he was 24 or 25 years old. It was on Ben Nevis that he observed his shadow cast upon the clouds.

Charles was fascinated by clouds and studied how clouds form. His experiments found that charged particles could seed or stimulate the production of clouds.

Thirty-three years later, in 1927, Charles Wilson, with Arthur Compton, received the Nobel Prize for Physics as a result of his work on clouds.

Particle physicists used Wilson's cloud chambers to track the path of charged particles like cosmic rays, electrons, or muons.

For those of you that are handy, you can make one of these babies. Here is a link to a page to show you how. It might be great for a science Friday.

Who cares what the paths of cosmic rays or electrons look like? I will save a post or two about that branch of science, and the benefits of CERN or TRIUMF or SLAC or the proposed CLIC for another day.

Today your humble scribe will take a different perspective because he comes, in a literary sense, from the perspective of making the invisible visible.

Cuneiform is a type of script, one of the very first scripts.

Sepiru, as I have mentioned before, is Akkadian cuneiform for "scribe". To see what Sepiru, or scribe, looks like in Akkadian cuneiform script, visit here.

The point of scripts is that they make invisible language visible.

With a script, words do not just leave a shadow on our psyche. Written words can leave a shadow on a society, like Mao's Little Red Book.

The written word can also illuminate a society, like the Book of Kells which helped re-introduce literacy to medieval Europe and which kept the spark of light, literacy, alive to lead Europe out of the Dark Ages.

Giving depth and solidity to the invisible and intangible, the imagined or envisioned, is what makes writers write.

Your scribe's favourite words made visible would be a toss-up between Milton's Paradise Lost which has shaped English literature for 400 years and the Roman Emperor Justinian's legal writings which have shaped Europe and the world for almost 1600 years.

In yesterday's post your scribe talked about tracking interest, on the Internet, in postings.

Your scribe finds it fascinating to watch how people connect over the Internet.

This post started with a cloud chamber because cloud chambers allows the observer to track the invisible.

Browser software allows your scribe to track and "see" interest, which previously your scribe considered invisible.

(Your scribe notes this could be gender related. Most women seem astonished that men can be so oblivious to 'obvious' interest and attention generated by the same woman, or by another woman. This apparently indicates that, maybe, women can see 'invisible' interest. The scientist in me is willing to consider this a possibility.)

While tracking 'invisible' interest across the internet, it is amazing how short physical distances can become, at least from the perspective of e-conversations.

Observed interest in the two posts (the menagerie of pigs that fly and metal (post-industrial/post-modern golem?) Finns) mentioned yesterday seems to come in spurts.

Periodically, through the cloud chamber magic of software, I see splotches of attention focused on one of these posts crop up regionally, which may demonstrate the general truth that you are closest to those whom you are closest to.

This reflects the idea that physical proximity is a closer indicator of friendship than shared interests are. At university, your roommate or your dormitory friends may be your closest friends, even though there are likely many people with stronger and more congruent interests to yours; these others just do not happen to be as physically close to you as your roommate.

Sometimes the cloud chamber software revealed global chains of referred interest in a post, but the chamber also reveals linguistic similarities between the people presumably sharing the post.

These linked readers and referrers might be people that were once physically close but, with globalisation, are now chasing opportunities far apart from where they met.

To your scribe, however, the magic of the Internet is that frequently I cannot discern or guess at the connection between various voyeurs, even with the magic cloud chamber software.

When the connections are not obvious I happily believe that these readers share interests despite their far-flung physical distance from their apparent e-friends.

To me, that is e-magic.

E-contact through the e-aether, made e-visible by e-clouds.

E-amazing...

e-Tschuess,

Sepiru Chris

Spread like a virus, sting like a bee...

Dear Gentle Reader,

After a week talking about the Black Death entering Europe, via Mongolian germ warfare, your scribe is switching focus to going viral on the Internet.

Two of your scribe's posts smoulder along, keeping a low level of interest alive like a peat or a bog fire. 

Between one third to one half of my daily traffic is due to strangers visiting to look at these two postings.

Fantastic! ...Then these readers move on...

Obviously I am not as fantastic as I wish I was.

These posts seem to be sent by word of mouth, or, more accurately, by word of finger campaigns.

Your scribe watches as people with a common interest in pigs and roosters, or in Finnish metal culture, share their enthusiasm, through their fingers, with each other. 

These emailed referrals never go full-viral, they always fail to exceed the tipping point.

Better writing is needed to exceed the tipping point.

The realization that my writing needs to get better stings a little, like a baby bee sting, but mostly it prods me to keep working.

Which postings are getting passed around the web?

These two.

Prayers for no rain: the Finnish threat and Lordi

and

Tales from the Field: A pig in a plane

The quixotic nature of the web continues to surprise your scribe.

If you write a blog or a website, which pages attract external attention? Of even more interest, are these the pages that you thought might attract or deserve a wider attention? Leave me a link so that we can all check them out!

Tschuess,

Chris

Defend the Clan! Walled villages in the New Territories

Dear Gentle Reader,

Sometimes a protective deity is not enough to keep you safe from the spiders, snakes, and bandits here in Hong Kong.

The famous fighting Shaolin monks always thought that you needed to do more than to rub Buddha's belly; Shaolin monks were also prepared to battle.

I should note that Shaolin monks, from their perspective, do not fight.

Shaolin monks simply refuse to accept violence offered to them and, therefore, they return violent offerings to the sender (postage prepaid).

Shaolin Temple in Henan Province, China is the mythical birthplace of both Chinese kung fu and Zen Buddhism some time after 464 AD (eleven years after Attila the Hun died and nine years after the Huns sacked Rome).

Shaolin monks have had a lot of time perfecting their techniques of returning violent offerings to senders, aka learning to deal with bad guys. Why? Well, apparently, China has had a lot of bad guys.

If John Woo's observations on Hong Kong in The Killer and other films are correct, then residents of Hong Kong need to take some lessons from the Shaolin Monks, or the monks of Smith and Wesson.

John Woo thinks that there are a lot of bad guys in Hong Kong, too.

That life has always been dangerous in Hong Kong, and that extra safety precautions were necessary, were the lessons which we took from a recent walk in the New Territories, part of Hong Kong abutting Mainland China.

This day walk took us through fields, countryside, and a series of old walled villages dating back to the sixteenth century.

Sometimes overgrown with vegetation on the outside, these villages have been clan villages for centuries and we walked to, and through, five walled villages. These walled villages were, and remain, the communal villages for particular clans.

Each walled village had only one entrance/exit inside a gate tower. The doors could be great wooden affairs, consist of iron loops, or be horizontal wooden rods. If you didn't have the secret code, the right last name, entry could become a contact sport.

The single entry made it easier to control access. Further, each entrance guard tower had an upper room for village defenders to fire on outsiders.

Below is a close up of one of the arrow-slits from the inside.

Your humble scribe liked this arrow slit; a classic case of form following function.

Your scribe noted that the Chinese arrow slit allowed for a full horizontal, and some vertical, sweep of the defender's field of arrow-fire.

Your Heroine noted that the hole in the arrow slit was about the same size as your scribe's hand; hopefully an opening this small would have blocked ingress to the giant spiders of the apocalypse.

The villages have developed and become modern, although older buildings, besides the walls, remain.

I assume, however, that new construction is relatively labour intensive, as the village walls, in each village we visited, remain fully intact. (How, for example, would cranes be brought in?)

Finally, while the villages have modernized, we understand that these villages are still the cultural repositories for rituals that have disappeared elsewhere. Your Heroine and I look forward to returning to observe some of the ritual events in these villages at the appropriate times in the Chinese lunar calendar.

Now, however, we are safely back in Hong Kong proper.

Time to lock the doors, throw the bolts, and shutter the windows.

Thank goodness the guards are on duty tonight to keep the bad guys out...

Tschuess,

Chris, Regina, and Pommes mit apprehension