How To Go Viral

Among other things, Jonah Peretti is a founder of BuzzFeed and Huffington Post. Like a performance artist who uses the Internet as his medium, Peretti is simultaneously working with larger themes, and not just commercial ones.

He’s a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and projects like the Nike sweatshop e-mails are usually hilarious but also are object lessons in the anatomy of meme creation, ideas or messages that the world latches onto with its cognitive surplus. From there it’s a short step to applying media theory to questions with huge practical relevance, like “How can you spread your ideas and make them go viral on the web?”, the question he asks in the first slide of this interesting and humorous slidecast. If you have a ‘practical interest’ in increasing web traffic, maybe even your own, do not miss this. I’m looking for a video of this talk, though these notes do get the point across. (Just the ‘Bored At Work Network’ a big idea.)