Vassar Technology Today | YouTube not the only way to get attention online

Matthew Leung Columnist

Multimedia-sharing sites such as YouTube and Blip.tv have served as an American Idol for a few startup amateurs, who have made it to fame without having to deal with Simon Cowell. Adam Bahner, a grad student from Minneapolis, created a few YouTube videos last year and got hired by Dr. Pepper to do a commericial shortly thereafter, with numerous talk show appearances to boot. But with 72 million YouTube videos and millions more uploaded daily, viewers’ attention is no easy feat.

The ideas that get attention online are very different from those that receive media attention on TV, radio and in newspapers. So different, in fact, that many people do not realize that there exist other online paths to notoriety besides blogs and YouTube .

These are three examples of attracting attention more than fame:

1.) Generating Web site visits with interesting content seems to be a hackneyed approach, with more than 11 billion Web pages out there. But once in a while, an idea is so ludicrous it breaks through the swarm.

An writer named James Downey started a project to literally paint the moon in 2001. After writing about the idea in his science-fiction novel, Communication of Dreams, he decided that if one million people simultaneously pointed a laser beam to a specific area of the moon, there would be a laser dot on the moon large and bright enough for everyone around the world to see.

The idea stimulated the imaginations of just about a million people, and the Web site he created for the project had more than 800 thousand visitors before the project failed.

2.) Another example of unusual online fame is phone wireless networks. When blogs and tech support sites were recently flooded with complaints from people who were unable to connect to supposedly free public wireless networks. Whenever people traveled and scanned for available wireless networks, they saw a network with the name “Free Public WiFi” or a similar variation, but could not get onto the Web. In fact, I sometimes see that network name at Vassar.

This invalid network is so popular that you will see it just about anywhere laptops are found, specifically Windows laptops. The mystery was solved when the problem was traced back to—big surprise—a programming error from Microsoft.

Any Windows user who has not upgraded to the XP Service Pack Two and tries to connect to the “Free WiFi” network will unknowingly broadcast the phony network from his or her own laptop. The “Free WiFi” networks originated from either genuinely free access points or hackers. As people travel and unknowingly broadcast this network name from their own laptops, the search for the “Free WiFi” becomes a public frenzy and spreads wherever people travel.

Intentional or unintentional originators of these networks can give them whatever names they want and even attach messages to these phony networks.

3) Facebook has also opened the gates to online stardom. When Facebook opened to the public, it allowed people to join “public” groups from any network. Many attempts were made to form the largest group, and one even tried to break a Guinness Book of World Records record.

The idea that attracted the most people was the group “Six Degrees Of Separation—The Experiment,” with 4.3 million members (which technically breaks the Guinness Book of World Records). The creator of the group, Steve Jackson, claims that if everyone invited all of their friends to join the group, the experiment would be realized. Coincidentally, Jackson lists his personal Web site on the groups’ front page.

Gone are the days when getting the attention of one million people requires remarkable skills and prolonged labor. If you’re ready for your close-up, you can go to Vassar’s Get Web, a personal/public Web space that is free for all members of the Vassar community, where self-publishing is only a few clicks away. Or you can use companies such as godaddy.com, which sells domain names for $10 and can forward visitors of your domain to your Vassar Web space.