A nice story from BBC News online today - a pigeon called Winston beat ADSL in South Africa in a race to carry 4gb of data between two locations.
That's a good read in its own right, but it was also interesting to see how the organisers drummed up a fair amount of social media chatter around it.
An IT company in Durban, called Unlimited, decided to test out the notion that carrier pigeons really would be faster than South Africa's much maligned broadband network. The pigeon won easily, arriving with a USB stick at the designated location an hour and eight minutes after taking off, at which point ADSL had only transmitted 4% of the data.
Needless to say Unlimited created a social media campaign around Winston's race, including a website complete with rules (no performance enhancing birdseed allowed), which had (at time of writing) been tweeted about 200+ times. There is also a Facebook fan page, with 2000+ members and a Pigeon Race twitter feed.
At the moment, carrier pigeons and pigeonrace09 are also trending quite highly on Twitter...though it's only 8am on the East Coast of the US, and the US of course accounts for over 6/10 Twitter users. On that note, crack of dawn in the US is usually a good time to see what's trending in the rest of the world - yesterday for example it was the new Dubai Metro.
- Pigeon Race 2009 (marcforrest.com)
- Google Street View coming to South Africa... (stustake.com)
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