unfortunate placement of yahoo ad
Sunday, April 29th, 2007Or, how a funny little picture became famous.
A couple weeks ago, David, Jennifer and I went to San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo. While we were there, David’s dad was able to get us tickets to the Giants, Cardinals game at the beautiful AT&T Park. While we where there, we had the camera out almost the entire time. David and I even got to try our hand at some sports photography from way up on the third base line with the telephoto lens. Jennifer pointed out that the Yahoo! ad was right next to the 404 foot sign. (For those less technically inclined, 404 is the error code for “Page Not Found.”) I snapped a picture, and Jennifer posted it to her flickr account.
David was showing our trip pictures to his Dad, who thought the Yahoo! picture was funny and mentioned it to John Murrell, who then wrote about it in “Good Morning Silicon Valley” on Thursday. When heard about this Friday morning, the picture had around 6,000 views. How cool is that! Wouldn’t it be neat if we posted it to Digg and it got on the front page? Well, as all things that have the slightest chance of being popular on the Internet are, someone (digismyworld, go figure) had already submit it to Digg. So I was the 7th person to digg it and headed off to a meeting. When I got back, it had just hit the front page and the Flickr page showed 17,000 views.
By the end of the day, the picture had over 100,000 views, the digg post was #1 on the top 10 list with over 4,000 diggs (beating the second place post by almost 2000 diggs), and dozens of people had blogged the picture.
Wow.
I don’t know most of the people who have seen the picture, but there are a couple I do:
Yahoo! blogged it.
Eric Meyer added the picture as a favorite. He’s written a couple books on CSS and I read his blog.
John Battelle blogged it. He did a very nice job at the Web 2.0 Expo interviewing Eric Schmidt (of Google), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) and Jeff Weiner (of Yahoo!).
Where is it now? Well, the number are still going up, but right now there are 5088 diggs, 150 blog posts about it, and 195,031 views of the picture.
Now I just need to find 5,000 of my closest friends to go look at the picture and we’ll break the 200,000 mark…