TIM BOUCHER, FALL 2010

A Three-Part Analysis

In my recent collaborations with [The Real Pizza SEO™], I’ve been closely studying esoteric data transmission patterns on the web. Admittedly, the collection of tools I’ve been using has been limited to a few popular web technologies, but the results I’ve seen have been of interest to me and seem to correlate with observable patterns of how information flows from groups and individuals in an almost tidal spiral fashion.

Real world example first: recently went to a party where everyone had song books during dinner. Songs would spontaneously erupt from a certain section of the room as people became more and more intoxicated. Whether the whole room would then catch on and begin singing that song seemed to be up for grabs. Certain segments of the group would start a song only to have it not be picked up by others and die in the wings. Others would tend to be able to float things up onto the backs of the crowd a little more regularly. Politics, how to sing loud, how to act compelling and get others excited about whatever song you’re singing.

Internet Nerd Examples: Been messing around with the microstatus update service, Twitter. Sort of allows you to connect to an almost real-time SMS-based group of other users. Enables rapid group communication, and has interesting re-transmission side-effects because of the way that user groups work, in little clusters of “followers” of a particular user’s microstream. Dorking it down again for the rest of us, you can post a stream of keywords on Twitter, and then see what keywords other users respond with. Based on their original stream of keywords, you may end up picking up and re-transmitting to your own unique user group any keywords in the original stream.

Another example: for a while, my content on this site was getting regularly scraped, broken down and re-transmitted in chunks by automated spamming blogs, run by algorithms whose purpose it is to seek out novel clusters of keywords around a particular base seed, and then try to grow a crop of ad revenue and search rankings before withering away ephemerally.

Laminating the three back together: the way data works on the internet is essentially the same way as it works amongst a group of drunk humans singing: someone will start up a song, or a particular keyword string, and if – for whatever reason – it gets picked up by others, gets re-transmitted back down the line. For the spammy internet system to work though, you need to have sources of novelty entering essentially “newness” or new, unique patterns into the stream.

Applied to business: it’s not significant that a marketer or a politician (same thing, same masters, remember) can therefore enter in a particular song or keyword cluster into the public consciousness and have it get picked up and re-transmitted. Because anybody can do that, and it happens spontaneously as a result of any emergent system characteristics (of whose members exhibit Free Will). What becomes significant then is if a marketer, an SEO, a politican, a rapper, a php coder, can inject many such data points into the public sensorium, and then use them as navigational guides, and deeply buried reference points with which to steer or shepherd customer behavior: you want to get people to buy your product. Or you want to get people to read your articles. Or you want to get people to sing your songs. Call and response. The origin of Blues Music.

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