EchoDitto

Do you throw back beers with the same few buddies at the same dive bar? Or do you spend your weekends on the house party circuit, sipping appletinis and trying to remember names?

No, I'm not already dreaming of Friday. Believe it or not, the answer to this question is an excellent indicator of your social network - and extremely relevant to nonprofits, campaigns, or anyone else who wishes to send a message through this network.

At last week's Internet Advocacy Roundtable, Harald Katzmair of FAS.research gave an enlightening presentation (podcast - 83mb) on social network analysis and how it can help nonprofits do more with less.

I too went to the South by Southwest interactive conference this past week in Austin, Texas. The panel discussions covered a healthy range of topics that could fall under blogging, mobile content and distribution, web 2.0 applications, web design and entrepreneurship for web 2.0 ideas.

I enjoyed almost all the panels I attended. Unfortunately, some of the presenters were more interested in hyping their own sites rather than educating the audience. I know, it goes with the territory since most bloggers and entrepreneurs need all the attention they can get just to make ends meet. I can tolerate some buzzing, but the "How To Add Video To Your Blog panel" was a whole lot o' grandstanding and not a lot of best practices.

I'm kind of left in awe of South By Southwest. I think the thing that best sums it up is what Wilson said: that everyone was excited about something. The buzz was palpable, and it was widely distributed.

I roamed the convention center, I attended a panel during every slot, sometimes jumping around to keep my interest piqued, and I definitely participated in the essential nightlife. I drank it in (no pun intended), from eight every morning until past midnight every night. I'm not sure it would have been the same without the posse, but even then, it wouldn't have been the same without all the great people that I met and got to hang out with.

A digital virus spread by terrorists left bodies on the streets and cities quarantined by the government.

As mentioned at SecurityFocus, among other places, Blizzard's hugely popular World of Warcraft MMORPG was hit by an unexpected viral plague. A new gameplay area was introduced that could inflict a contagious plague onto players. However, game designers did not anticipate the rapid travel of the plague throughout the whole game universe -- potentially tens of thousands of players on each "realm", or server world. Whether intentional or accidental, soon thousands of lower-level players were unable to keep from dying as the plague ran rampant through city streets.

I'm calling it. Bill for First Lady.

Iraq War Fatalities

Push the button and watch the counts click by, according to date, location, and allied country.

Quickyblog! Quick, blog! Blog quickly!

ITEM ONE: EYEBEAM CONTAGEOUS MEDIA SHOWDOWN!

Announcing the world's first Contagious Media Showdown. Do you have what it takes to corral enough traffic to win the cash prizes? Can you make the next Dancing Baby, All Your Base, or Star Wars Kid and ride into the sunset with the bounty? This is your chance to prove you are the best in the West... In short, it's a formalization of the general phenomenon of lots of people making lots of silly stuff on the internet, some of which lots of other people see and enjoy.

ITEM TWO: LIZ WINSTEAD SAYS CBS SHOULD PODCAST!

Liz Winstead, creator of The Daily Show, talked with The New York Times on Sunday about how CBS should change the format of their evening news and recoup their sad sad third-place market-share. Among her excellent recommendations:

It's also important that they provide this as a podcast. They could charge people. You could listen online. You could listen at the gym.

ITEM THREE: PEW STANDS BY ITS DATA!

The saga continues:

We also thought that it was useful to report these findings even on a relatively small sample because there is growing interest in podcasting and we at the Pew Internet Project are being asked more frequently if we have any data on this subject. We thought these numbers were legitimate to report because they are the first from a national sample to take a stab at defining the podcast-user universe.

OK, we're cool. Actually, "Stand By Your Data" sounds like a great title for a great twenty-first-century love-ballad. So does "Listen At The Gym". Consider this story in-development.

The "Happening Now" box on EchoDitto.com's frontpage is powered by del.icio.us. HubLog just determined the most trendsetting posters on del.icio.us for January 2005 by measuring who initially discovered the weblinks that eventually become the most popular. It turns out that EchoDitto is one of the top most delicious. Cool!

I suppose we have an advantage on most posters, since rocking peer-to-peer web communications is actually our full-time job. But it still means EchoDitto is all trendsetters. Just so you know.

update: I guess HubLog changed his algorithm or something, because we are no longer on his list. If you missed us, sorry you slept. Soon we will be retro.

I first referenced the Jesusland map here on the echo blog 16 days ago.

Since then, the map has been all over the traditional media news, the internet, and back again—and we have been proven guilty by association. The post is currently at the top of the second page of results when you Google "Jesusland", and some 1,200 people have found their way to our site through this search result.

What's more interesting to me, though, is that 24 people have commented on the post—letting us and everyone know how they feel about the map and, in 3 cases, adding maps or images of their own to the discussion.

These 24 comments represent a simple but poignant example of what makes the internet the empowering, community building tool that it is. Although none of us commenting on the map know one another, we are joined by a common interest in this topic or image.

Our loose connection may not be much, but there's something to be said for the knowledge that people are listening and responding to one another during the attention deficit we're supposedly experiencing. And the internet removes almost every barrier that exists for having this loose, decentralized dialogue.

This is the first time I've seen art go "viral"--especially installation art.

Title: There Is Nothing Wrong In This Whole Wide World
Author: Chris Cobb
Photos: Pushby.com/tomas
Interview: McSweeney's

This brings up the question different sorts of viral. We generally think of it as an email phenomenon, like Jesusland or even NoIraqDraft. But this demonstrates what I think of as "blog viral," something that gets posted again and again on personal and community blogs. It's really the perfect post, because at the same time it says "check out this cool thing I found" and "I am not merely a slave to technology! I too appreciate Art and Books and Other Such Refined Tastes." I suppose it's the blog equivalent of a coffee-table book.

I hope Chris Cobb does something with this success--data-captures, or even simply puts up a link to more of his work. Opportunities like this are an open door. Thousands of people are suddenly excited about art. Sure, a lot of them will click away and forget about it. But if you can grab a few and start to take them deeper and get them involved in a meaningful way--that's how it should be.