by Tim Wu
5. Stephen Manes, “The New MSN as Prehistoric TV,” February 4, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/04/science/the-new-msn-as-prehistoric-tv.html. According to Harmon, Microsoft only had 2.3 million subscribers, which is minimal in light of the fact that MSN was already preinstalled on the millions of personal computers Microsoft sold.
6. Information about the partnership between Microsoft and NBC can be found at Michael Dresser, “Microsoft, NBC to Offer News Joint Venture Plans 24-Hour News on Cable, On-line Internet Service,” Baltimore Sun, December 15, 1995, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-12-15/business/1995349021_1_microsoft-cable-nbc-executives; and Megan Garber, “ ‘The Revolution Begins Here’: MSNBC’s First Broadcast, July 1996,” The Atlantic, July 16, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-revolution-begins-here-msnbcs-first-broadcast-july-1996/259855/.
7. Information about the first issue of Slate can be found at “Inaugural Issue of Slate, New Interactive Magazine from Microsoft and Editor Michael Kinsley, to Debut Online Today,” Microsoft News Center, June 24, 1996, http://news.microsoft.com/1996/06/24/inaugural-issue-of-slate-new-interactive-magazine-from-microsoft-and-editor-michael-kinsley-to-debut-online-today/.
8. General information about the growth and impact of Google comes from Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 94.
9. Battelle chronicles the success of Google in John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005).
10. The academic piece written by Brin and Page served as a presentation of Google as “a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.” See Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” paper presented at the Seventh International World-Wide Web Conference, Brisbane, Australia, April 14–18, 1998.
11. Battelle, The Search, 111.
12. Dan Gillmor, “To Be an Online Company, First Throw Out Old Rules,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 24, 1997, 123.
13. For additional information about GoTo and general criticism of the model, see Laurie J. Flynn, “With Goto.com’s Search Engine, the Highest Bidder Shall Be Ranked First,” New York Times, March 16, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/16/business/with-gotocom-s-search-engine-the-highest-bidder-shall-be-ranked-first.html; “Rankings for Sale: Payola on the Information Highway? Or Payments for Good Shelf Space?,” From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal 10 (2001), http://www.fno.org/apr01/payola.html.
14. Brin and Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”
15. For a description of the term “Googley,” see Sara Kehaulani Goo, “Building a ‘Googley’ Workforce,” Washington Post, October 21, 2006.
16. A more detailed description of Google’s AdWords can be found at “How AdWords Works,” Google Support, February 21, 2016, https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2497976?hl=en. For additional information about AdWords success, see Peter Coy, “The Secret to Google’s Success,” Bloomberg Business, March 5, 2006; Steven Levy, “Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability,” Wired, May 22, 2009.
17. Douglas Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 190.
18. Levy, “In the Plex,” 94.
CHAPTER 21: HERE COMES EVERYONE
1. Rebecca Mead, “You’ve Got Blog: How to Put Your Business, Your Boyfriend, and Your Life Online,” The New Yorker, November 13, 2000, 102. Mead’s story was published in the collection We’ve Got Blog: How Webblogs Are Changing Our Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
2. See Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008).
3. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, 55.
4. Jorn Barger, one of the early webloggers, first used the term to capture the concept of “logging the web,” or “collecting interesting things from around the world and writing about them on the internet.” See Ogi Djuraskovic, “Robot Wisdom and How Jorn Barger Invented Blogging,” firstsiteguide.com, March 20, 2015, http://firstsiteguide.com/robot-wisdom-and-jorn-barger/.
5. Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2000), 76. The book was originally published on the web in March 1999.
6. David Weinberger, “What Blogging Was,” Joho the Blog, January 8, 2014, http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2014/01/08/what-blogging-was/.
7. Erin Venema developed the word “escribitionist” in 1999 to distinguish between web journal authors and those who kept their diaries on paper. See www.escribitionist.org, a webpage containing a copy of the email in which Venema first used the word.
8. Jimmy Wales, February 7, 2011, answer to “Why does Wikipedia ask for donations rather than having ads?,” Quora, https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Wikipedia-ask-for-donations-rather-than-having-ads.
9. Virginia Heffernan, The Medium: The Way We Watch Now (blog), http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com//.
10. See Allan J. Kimmel, Connecting with Consumers: Marketing for New Marketplace Realities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
11. Jeff Jarvis and John Griffin, “Is Print Doomed?,” Fast Company, December 1, 2005, http://www.fastcompany.com/54733/print-doomed.
12. Lev Grossman, “You—Yes, You—Are TIME’s Person of the Year,” Time, December 25, 2006, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html.
13. Jon Pareles, “2006, Brought to You by You,” New York Times, December 10, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/arts/music/10pare.html?pagewanted=print.
14. See Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
15. See Greg Miller, “Turn On, Boot Up, and Jack In with Timothy Leary’s Long-Lost Video Games,” Wired, October 1, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/10/timothy-leary-video-games/.
16. C. W. Nevius interviewed Dave Barry after Barry came to speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. C. W. Nevius, “Podcasts, Blogs, and Dave Barry,” SFGATE, January 31, 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Podcasts-blogs-and-Dave-Barry-2523537.php.
17. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 5.
18. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, 66.
19. Jeff Jarvis, “My Testimony to Sen. Kerry,” Buzz Machine, April 21, 2009, http://buzzmachine.com/2009/04/21/my-testimony-to-sen-kerry/.
CHAPTER 22: THE RISE OF CLICKBAIT
1. For a personal recounting of Peretti’s challenge to Nike’s corporate image, “the ensuing email correspondence with Nike [that] became a global anti-sweatshop event, which made national news in large consuming societies,” and the global impact, see Jonah Peretti, “The Nike Sweatshop Email: Political Consumerism, Internet, and Culture Jamming,” in Politics, Products, and Markets: Exploring Political Consumerism Past and Present, ed. Michele Micheletti (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 130–31. For the entire chain of emails exchanged between Peretti and Nike, circulating since January 2001, see “Jonah Peretti’s Nike ‘Sweatshop’ Email,” About.com, accessed February 19, 2016, http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blnike.htm.
2. These quotes from Peretti were drawn from an interview by Tim Wu. April 4, 2012. Approximately “11.4 million people received the Nike Sweatshop Email” and “over a three-month period, [Peretti] received 3,655 inquiries.” Peretti, Politics, Products, and Markets, 132. To read more about how the email spread so quickly
and to read some of the inquiries Peretti received, see Peretti, “The Nike Sweatshop Email,” in Politics, Products, and Markets.
3. Nicola Bednarek, ed., Fresh Dialogue 8: Designing Audiences/New Voices in Graphic Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008); Greg Holden, Internet Babylon: Secrets, Scandals, and Shocks on the Information Superhighway (New York: APress Media, 2004). To learn about Duncan Watts’s theories, see Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
4. “forget-me-not-panties,” Panchira Corp., 2005, http://www.forgetmenotpanties.com/. “The forget-me-not-panty site won for getting the most unique users, some 615,000 in the three weeks. Over the competition, it pulled in many times that, more than 20 million total visitors.” Heidi Dawley, “Alas, at Last, the forget-me-not-panty,” Media Life Magazine, December 5, 2005, http://www.medialifemagazine.com/alas-at-last-the-forget-me-not-panty/. To read more about the Eyebeam workshops, see “Contagious Media Showdown—Workshops,” Eyebeam, http://eyebeam.org/events/contagious-media-showdown-workshops. See also “Unfair Results at Contagious Media Showdown?,” Google Blogoscoped, May 21, 2005, http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-05-21-n39.html.
5. To read all twenty-three points, see Jonah Peretti, “Notes on Contagious Media,” 160–61, http://www.cultura.gov.br/documents/10877/35301/9-peretti.pdf/684f6ada-4479-4bed-a3a0-f434837f3e6b. Joe Karaganis, Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2007). Felix Salmon, “BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Goes Long: The Media Mogul (Twice Over) on Being Both Contagious and Sticky,” A Media Corporation, https://medium.com/matter/buzzfeeds-jonah-peretti-goes-long-e98cf13160e7#.sjme15us5.
6. For the full LA Weekly critique of The Huffington Post, see Nikki Finke, “Celebs to the Slaughter,” LA Weekly, May 12, 2005, http://www.laweekly.com/news/celebs-to-the-slaughter-2139949. For other highlights from early critiques, see Liz C. Barrett, “Top 5 UNENTHUSIASTIC HuffPo Reviews of 2005,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 10, 2010, http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/top_5_unenthusiastic_huffpo_re.php. Richard A. Gershon, Digital Media and Innovation: Management and Design Strategies in Communication (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2016). The editors of The Huffington Post, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). Kerric Harvey, ed., Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2013).
7. Bill Gueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves, “Chapter Six: Aggregation,” Columbia Journalism Review, May 10, 2011, http://www.cjr.org/the_business_of_digital_journalism/chapter_six_aggregation.php. For additional statistics on and details about The Huffington Post’s growth, see Michael Shapiro, “Six Degrees of Aggregation: How The Huffington Post Ate the Internet,” Columbia Journalism Review, June 2012, http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/six_degrees_of_aggregation.php.
8. As quoted in Joseph Turow, The Daily You (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 117. Nate Silver, “The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post,” New York Times, February 12, 2011, http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/; Bill Keller, “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate,” New York Times Magazine, March 10, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/magazine/mag-13lede-t.html?_r=0; Mike Friedrichsen and Wolfgang Muhl-Benninghaus, eds., Handbook of Social Media Management: Value Chain and Business Models in Changing Media Markets (New York: Springer Heidelberg, 2013).
9. Keith J. Kelly, “Huffington Post Turns 10—but Its Profits Are Still a Mystery,” New York Post, May 5, 2015; “AOL Agrees to Acquire The Huffington Post,” Huffington Post, February 7, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/07/aol-huffington-post_n_819375.html.
10. Doree Shafrir, “The Truth About Perez Hilton’s Traffic,” Gawker, July 10, 2007, http://gawker.com/276369/the-truth-about-perez-hiltons-traffic.
11. Elizabeth Day, “Mr Gossip Steps into the Real World,” The Guardian, September 30, 2007, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/sep/30/digitalmedia.fashion. Perez Hilton interview by Dan Avery, Big Words, December 8, 2001; Jacquelynn D. Powers, “Bringing Miami Spice to the Celebrity Dish,” Ocean Drive Magazine, http://www.siqueiros.com/oceandrive/hybrid/archives/2006_11/cover/index.html; Colleen Raezier, “How the Media Legitimized Perez Hilton, Cyber-Bully Extraordinaire,” NewsBusters, September 22, 2009, http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/colleen-raezler/2009/09/22/how-media-legitimized-perez-hilton-cyber-bully-extraordinaire; “Perez Hilton US Media Kit,” Perez Hilton, http://perezhilton.com/mediakit/US/; Will Wei, “WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Creators of ‘Lonelygirl15’ Turned Web Series into a Multi-Million Dollar Company,” Business Insider, July 20, 2010, http://www.businessinsider.com/where-are-they-now-creators-of-lonelygirl15-turned-web-series-into-a-multi-million-dollar-company-2010-7.
12. Jon Morrow, “Why I Quit Blogging (and What to Do if You’re Struggling),” Guest Blogging, http://guestblogging.com/quit-blogging/; David Weinberger, “This Blog Has Gone Spamtacular,” Joho the Blog, October 4, 2015, http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/category/blogs/.
13. Michael A. Banks, Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers (Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2008); Marta Cantijoch, Rachel Gibson, and Stephen Ward, Analysing Social Media Data and Web Networks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Paul Boutin, “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004,” Wired, October 20, 2008, http://www.wired.com/2008/10/st-essay-19/.
CHAPTER 23: THE PLACE TO BE
1. Alan J. Tabak, “Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website,” The Harvard Crimson, February 9, 2004.
2. George Beahm, The Boy Billionaire: Mark Zuckerberg in His Own Words (Chicago: Agate Publishing, 2012), 42.
3. Henry Blodget, “The Maturation of the Billionaire Boy-Man,” New York, May 6, 2012; David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
4. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17–18.
5. Erin E. Buckels et al., “Trolls Just Want to Have Fun,” Personality and Individual Differences 67 (2014), 1.
6. Max Chafkin, “How to Kill a Great Idea!,” accessed February 22, 2016, http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070601/features-how-to-kill-a-great-idea.html.
7. David Kirkpatrick, “I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends of Friends,” Fortune, October 13, 2003.
8. Shirin Sharif, “All the Cool Kids Are Doing It,” The Stanford Daily, April 30, 2004, A4.
9. Emily Rotberg, “Thefacebook.com Opens to Duke Students,” The Chronicle Online, April 14, 2004; Shirin Sharif, “All the Cool Kids Are Doing It,” The Stanford Daily, April 30, 2004, A4.
10. Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, 175.
11. Seth Fiegerman, “Friendster Founder Tells His Side of the Story, 10 Years After Facebook,” Mashable, February 3, 2014, http://mashable.com/2014/02/03/jonathan-abrams-friendster-facebook/#b9wfGLedTiqV.
12. Danah Boyd, “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook,” Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York: Routledge, 2011).
13. Amy Lee, “Myspace Collapse: How the Social Network Fell Apart,” Huffington Post, June 30, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/30/how-myspace-fell-apart_n_887853.html.
14. Fred Vogelstein, “The Wired Interview: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg,” Wired, June 29, 2009, http://www.wired.com/2009/06/mark-zuckerberg-speaks/.
15. Zeynep Tufekci, “Grooming, Gossip, Facebook and Myspace,” Information, Communication & Society, 11 (2008), 546, doi: 10.1080/13691180801999050.
16. Lar
ry Dignan, “Facebook’s IPO: Massive Valuation Brings Business Model Scrutiny,” May 16, 2012, http://www.cnet.com/news/facebooks-ipo-massive-valuation-brings-business-model-scrutiny/.
17. Brad Smallwood, “Making Digital Brand Campaigns Better,” October 1, 2012, https://www.facebook-studio.com/news/item/making-digital-brand-campaigns-better.
18. Christina Sagioglou and Tobias Greitemeyer, “Facebook’s Emotional Consequences: Why Facebook Causes a Decrease in Mood and Why People Still Use It,” Computers in Human Behavior 35 (June 2014).
CHAPTER 24: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING MICROFAMOUS
1. All quotes from Rex Sorgatz from author email interview beginning January 12, 2016.
2. Rex Sorgatz, “The Microfame Game,” New York, June 17, 2008.
3. James Ulmer, James Ulmer’s Hollywood Hot List: The Complete Guide to Star Ranking (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2014).
4. Misha Kavka, Reality TV (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 166.
5. Gareth Palmer, “The Undead: Life on the D-List,” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2 (2005), 40, discussing Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn’s argument over reality TV.
6. David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2008), 104.
CHAPTER 25: THE FOURTH SCREEN AND THE MIRROR OF NARCISSUS
1. Taylor Glascock, “Hipster Barbie Is So Much Better at Instagram than You,” Wired, September 3, 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/09/hipster-barbie-much-better-instagram/.