Last Wednesday, Michael Wesch was one of thousands of Internet users to add material to the video-sharing site YouTube. He posted a five-minute clip, set to techno music, that helps explain Web 2.0 — the so-called second wave of Web-based services that enables people to network and aggregate information online.
The next morning, Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, sent the link to 10 colleagues and friends. It was a second draft. He mostly wanted their feedback. And they responded positively by forwarding the link to a few of their friends. Within hours, the video had more than 100 hits on YouTube.
“I was elated,” Wesch said. “By that time I was already satisfied that I generated a viral video.”
Eventually, a popular blogger discovered the video and posted it onto his site, which helped send the hits into the thousands. Scores of people saw the clip through the Internet blog search engine Technorati, and a number of them promoted it to the front page of the news aggregate site digg. By then, the blogosphere was all over Wesch’s project, and some were calling it a must-see video for anyone wanting to understand the hottest features of the Web.
The video page had been viewed 19,000 times by early Monday, 30,000 times by the afternoon and 91,000 times by early Tuesday.
Wesch’s experience of quick Web exposure is hardly rare in an age of hyperlinks, blogs and constant content sharing. And it has helped illustrate the power of Web 2.0 to his class on “digital ethnography.” Students, who have been discussing what makes a video popular on sites such as YouTube, viewed the video on Thursday, before it became an Internet hit. Wesch said the class is researching the social and cultural phenomena of the Internet and how the technology has spawned new language (HTML-speak, for instance).
Read the full article: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/07/web
Inside Higher Ed News, Feb. 7, 2007
