Old college pal suddenly becomes briefly noted by creating IAmDrTiller.com

Andy Warhol really was a visionary. He probably wasn't thinking about the Internet with his notorious "fifteen minutes of fame" remark, but how true is it in the days of viral video and Digg? Now everyone is just a heartbeat away from being a viral celebrity, getting a shout-out on old media or shooting to the top of Digg/the blogosphere/twittersphere.


A politically-minded college acquaintance of mine and his girlfriend were unhappy about the brutal murder of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller a few weeks ago. They registered a domain, created a concept, created a tribute site called I am Dr Tiller, and coded it in a few hours. Within a few days, highly rated blogs like Jezebel and some MSM-run blogs like the Toronto Star had picked it up. And within a week, the site was mentioned and derided on the O'Reilly Factor itself (Clip here, Website mentioned around 4:45. No embed is possible, apparently).

It's telling how quickly their site became linked and discussed on both the Web and even television. In a follow-up post, he noted that he was now protecting his Tweets because of the crazies that the O'Reilly Factor sent his way, but at the same time that Jezebel's direct linking of the site brought in much more traffic than O'Reillly mentioning it. Even if O'Reillly has a larger platform than Jezebel (and I'm actually not sure that he does), it still didn't translate to people going to their computers and imputing the URL manually. Linking by another website however, did translate into page visits.

Either way, it's shocking how quickly someone's pet part-time web project can get on the radar and become part of the national conversation and debate. And it's even more shocking how quickly these things fizzle and fade before the Internet masses move onto the next meme. 15 minutes of fame, indeed.