Influx

The re-cut version of the Shining became something of a viral meme in the last week of September bubbling up through bloggers to the mainstream media. Influx decided to take a look back at the history of this meme to see if we could learn anything about what it takes to create a pervasive idea.

Using various blog search engines, we traced the Shining remix meme.

September 9th- Film maker wins contest (Association of Independent Creative Editors) and sends link to three friends

September 25th- One blog post from a Live Journal blogger

September 28th- Leading bloggers (Waxy.org/links) pick up the story-

September 29th- NYT Reports a web exclusive

October 1st- Pubsub reports 260 sites linking into PS260′s website

October 8th- Ifilm stats show the film leading the spoof viral videos with 50,126 views in the last 7 days. Alexa has the production company hosting the site ranked at 6,031 today.

It follows a pretty obvious route going people first distribute the information on emails, these emails are forwarded and eventually a blogger picks it up, larger bloggers find the small blogger and then the mainstream media gets the story. What’s interesting here is how quick the New York Times was. Mass media is normally criticized for being slow to the uptake, but this time, they almost broke the story.