When I vis­ited Chiron Bramberger a few weeks back he showed me some photos he had taken of doll­house fur­ni­ture staged in a com­puter case. I thought they were really neat. A couple of days ago I saw sim­ilar photos posted by Cory Doctorow on his blog BoingBoing, which has the rep­u­ta­tion of being the most-​​visited blog in the uni­verse. I shouted “hey!”, then read the post which attrib­uted the photos to a Russian case­modder. Such is the power of con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion that I instantly accepted that the photos on BoingBoing were only coin­ci­den­tally sim­ilar to Chiron’s, and forgot about it.

It turns out that those photos are indeed the ones Chiron took. Cory thought they were Russian because they had appeared on a Russian case-​​modding site. Now Chiron has a post of his own up indi­cating that those photos actu­ally appeared on a whole host of A-​​list blogs (in fact, I don’t think he even knew they had also appeared on BoingBoing when he wrote that list).

So Chiron’s little photo project seems to have a attained the max­imum of internet fame that such art projects can. Held up for admiring inspec­tion by thou­sands, per­haps mil­lions of internet readers who fre­quent the very crème-​​de-​​la-​​crème of blog­ging sites. Which is a great thing in it’s own right: to have your idea enjoyed by many. That’s cool. But I think I’ve always assumed that when I see somebody’s project do the rounds on the cool-​​things blogs, it must rep­re­sent some moment of per­sonal suc­cess for the orig­i­nator. Recognition and cred­i­bility and an increase in the world’s demands and atten­tions on that person. Perhaps some­times it does. In this case Chiron appar­ently didn’t even know it was hap­pening until after the fact. Chiron does have projects that merit atten­tion; some are non-​​commercial, like the Broken Happiness Machines and Petsynth projects which have formed the bulk of the con­tent on hugh​stimson​.org lately, and also Flytrap Gear, which is com­mer­cial at least in the sense that it would be most suc­cessful con­cep­tu­ally if lots of people bought stuff. Did any of the dollhouse-​​mod traffic accrue to Petsynth or Flytrap? I’m guessing no, since there were no links even to Chiron’s sites.

This isn’t a com­plaint, I’m not implying that the blogs which fea­tured the doll­house photos did any­thing wrong in doing so, or were obliged to do the kind of deep research which might or might not have tracked the photos back from the Russian site to Chiron, and I’m not dis­re­specting the basic fun of having Chi’s photos traded around by admiring folks world­wide. But the dis­con­nect is interesting.

It’s also mir­rored some­what by Morris Rosenthal’s expe­ri­ences. He wrote a book about com­puter diag­nosis and repair, and also pre­pared a series of excel­lent diag­nostic flow­charts, which he posted on his web­site in 2003 hoping they might “go viral” and show up on CS stu­dents’ dorm walls and blogger blogs. He reports that over the years those flow­charts have indeed had some suc­cess on the inter­nets, but didn’t blow up as a “dis­covery” of great nov­elty and now­ness until sud­denly this year (landing them for instance on BoingBoing). Apparently this sudden virality isn’t related to any change in the way he posts or pub­li­cizes the flow­charts, it’s just a random fluc­tu­a­tion in interest which was ampli­fied through the law of increasing returns gov­erning the link-​​blog uni­verse into a random frenzy. A but­terfly tweets in Tokyo Harbour and there is a storm over the Metafilter Coast. Morris also sug­gests that that wave of non­linear virality helped book sales, but only a little. Perhaps that is due in part to blog­gers’ ten­dency to link an item to the blog they dis­cov­ered it on with the ubiquo­tous [via] tag, rather than to the item’s orig­inal source.

Incidentally, it’s been my policy on hugh​stimson​.org to link to the orig­inal source of an item if pos­sible, although I’ve often had a twinge of guilt in doing so. I worry that it might appear that I’m claiming orig­inal research, when I’m actu­ally riding the same wave of aggre­gate fas­ci­na­tion that powers everyone else’s blogging.

Another dis­con­nect: even though tens of thou­sands of people did in the end find the pri­mary web­site for the book from which the flow­charts were derived, the dif­fer­ence in actual book sales was on the order of 1%. Mr. Rosenthal says

“Most mar­keting con­sul­tants and pro­mo­tional experts aren’t focused on bottom line sales because they can’t deliver them. They’ll expect you to cel­e­brate the number of web­sites quoting your story, the number of vis­i­tors to your site, the number of links that show up on unre­lated sites around the world.”

That kind of uncom­mer­i­cal­iz­able com­mer­ciality makes me think of the cur­rent Twitter fas­ci­na­tion. Every busi­ness entity in the world wants Twitter cred. And somehow this social net­working addendum, best suited in form to trivial nar­cis­sism, has become a busi­ness oblig­a­tion. Employees are obliged to twitter whether they want to or not. Why? Retweets and fol­lowers are not minted on the gold stan­dard. You can’t turn them in to Bank of Twitter for an equiv­a­lent weight in gold shav­ings. The occa­sional sto­ries about com­mer­ical returns (think “Dell Sells Computers on Twitter”) only seem to point up the ridicu­lous­ness of the pos­si­bility of making real money through one-​​liners. But busi­nesses want pro­file, seem­ingly for its own sake. The con­nec­tion between online suc­cess and inte­grated meat-​​world suc­cess has always struck me as a non-​​simple one, and the expe­ri­ences of folks like Chiron and Morris Rosenthal seems to sug­gest it may be very non-​​linear indeed.