Google Bombs and Staying Hip

On an endless drive to Redwood City (spotted only three redwoods, all of recent origin) I had plenty of time to catch an interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation with author Bill Wasik about "going viral" on the Internet and other peculiar On-line trends. These included flash mobs (which Wasik invented), to Google bombs and geo caching. You probably already know everything about this stuff if you spend every hour of your day on the Internet. Since I don't it was all very interesting to me. Especially the Google bomb.


In the Google bomb, you and your friends and your friends' friends etc. all agree to Google a name, say, that of your ex-husband with a word, say, "philander". If this idea gets emailed around enough, these two words become linked together by Google's search engine protocol and voila! When someone totally out of the loop Google's "philander", up comes the name of, surprise, surprise, your ex-husband. What a hoot! Mostly this was used, however, by naughty 'netters who Google bombed George Bush with words like "lousy" and "worst president".
(More About the Google Bomb)

I realized in listening that I had accidentally Google bombed myself (but in a good way) by calling my blog "Robin Chapman News" because, with repeated blogs over time, I have linked the word "news" with my name. That's why people who knew me as a news anchor are now having an easier time finding my blog, which, I must admit was a much better outcome than I actually intended. I only called my blog Robin Chapman News because robinchapman.com was already taken by an English poet.

Funny things happen, though, to the items one places on ones blog. I have an old bus poster on one of my Web pages about my years at KGW-TV that includes me and three other KGW-TV anchors from long ago. Recently, one of my readers copied it to his Facebook page. From there someone emailed it to one of the other anchors on the bus poster, who emailed it to a man who used to be a news photographer at KGW-TV, who then emailed it to me with a note saying he thought it might "bring back fond memories". Hey wait. It started on my page in the first place!!! (How many degrees of separation was that?)

The bus poster that took a circuitous route on the Internet.

As to flash mobbing and geo caching, you can Google those. One involves going viral with some sort of quirky meeting, like everyone going to the rug department at Macy's and saying the same thing to the clerks. The other is a sort of Internet/GPS treasure hunt. At least I think that's what these things are.

I'd like to be hip enough to think of something that will "go viral", on the 'net the way the Jib Jab guys did with their "This Land" animation (and get rich in the process and they did). But ever since, after almost a decade in Washington D.C., I emerged having to ask a person in my Florida newsroom who Arrowsmith was, the prognosis may not be quite as good as I'd like.

(Bill Wasik on NPR's Talk of the Nation)