"How cool is it to see a meme" then? Well, probably very cool, provided you can actually pin it down and make it show it up on a screen. But memes are, to say the least, elusive and hardly predictable considering how they spread like wildfire, above and below the surface of the "visible" web.
We have actually been researching this issue, to be able -not only to monitor the viral spread of a blog post or viral video- but to actually see it propagate from one site to the next, from within one community to the web at large. When you're in the agency business, it's one cool thing to be able to get the buzz going about a product, it's an even cooler one to be able to show your client where, when and how it went viral.
Having built a comprehensive map of the US political web for this year's Personal Democracy Forum , we felt we had an ideal dataset to overlay the spread of two of the most blogged-about videos of this electoral cycle: John McCain's "Celebrity" attack ad, and Paris Hilton's blockbuster response.
Naturally, the Hilton video propagated well beyond the limits of the "political web" (a dataset of the 4,000+ leading sites and blogscovering US politics). With over 2700 direct links to the video (according to Google Blogsearch ) and more than 3 000 000 views at the end of August, the Hilton response video dwarfs the statsof the initial McCain (as shown in this graph ).
Aside from these raw numbers, the animated visualization below provides us with a glimpse of the dynamics of propagation over time on the political web: who blogged about it first, who picked up on it among progressive or conservative communities (with direct links to the post and authority ranks for each one of them). It is clear, from this viral propagation map, that Paris Hilton's video -unsurprisingly-elicited more "buzz", within the U.S. political web, than the originalMcCain ad.
linkfluence - pw08 - viral spread - McCain & Hilton videos from linkfluence on Vimeo .
But this is not just about creating cool animations. This type of data visualization can help answer three (out of six) key questions asked by Philip Sheldrake in his post:.
- "Who's most likely to have started this rumour?"
- "Who or what is exerting most influence?"
- "Who should we add to our list of key contacts / influencers?"
As to the author's conclusion about the beauty of some visualization techniques, well, we do our best, but no one could fault you if your preference went to watching the actual meme itself, especially one that's wearing a swimsuit and shiny high heels ;-)
*In the case of the Celebrity and Paris Hilton videos, there is no single "fire-starter" website, as both videos received considerable paid and earned media exposure, both off-line and online. Although it should be noted that the progressive community, acting as an aggregate trigger of online discussions, moved faster and displayed more interest in the end than the Conservative community.