Serendipity35

Reading Amber Mac's newsletter this week, I saw a connection with something I was writing on one of my other blogs about this idea of having content "go viral." It sounds like a great thing. But does it come at a cost?

Yes, it's tempting to jump on TikTok trends and participate in the bite-size-ification of social, but it's also possible to produce a steady and consistent flow of valuable, high-quality content that never goes viral. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see our video views rise, but it's not essential that we trend. I think we all know how that game works. Say something controversial or do something outrageous, and the algorithms will thank you for it.

In my opinion, that spike in attention might be a win, but it's a short-term win. In other words, not everyone should go viral. If that's what you're chasing, it could be a soul-crushing experience where you lose yourself and your authentic community along the way.  - Amber Mac

Bloggers often want their posts to go "viral." The word “viral” made a leap from medical terminology to broader cultural usage in the late 20th century, particularly in the context of marketing and media. I assumed that it was social media that moved the term from medical usage, but it is actually a bit earlier than the explosion of social media. In 1989, The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest use of “viral” to describe the rapid spread of information, marking its first known non-medical usage.

The term gained traction in marketing in 1999, especially “viral marketing,” which described campaigns that spread quickly and organically—much like a virus. In the early 2000s, phrases like “going viral” and “viral video” emerged. and by 2004, “going viral” was used to describe content that rapidly gained popularity online. From 2009 onward, viral became mainstream, fueled by the rise of social media platforms and shareable content.

It is a good and powerful metaphor. Like a biological virus, digital content can replicate and spread uncontrollably. That semantic link made “viral” the perfect word to describe the phenomenon of explosive online popularity.

I don't think I have had a "viral post," though I have had some posts that seem to get more views over the years than most of mine. But "viral" is when the surge of views hits all at once.

Can you push a post into the land of viral? I don't think so, but you can find articles about "how to," like 21 key elements for viral blog posts or explore 32 proven tactics to boost your chances - but there are certainly no guarantees.

Those kinds of articles will suggest things to do like these: Know your audience and tailor your tone, topic, and style to what resonates with them. Tap into trending issues, emotional stories, or highly useful how-tos. Use eye-catching images. Share across platforms with tailored captions and hashtags. Use analytics to see what’s getting attention and tweak accordingly. All of those make sense, and I tend to employ them most of the time.

Some suggestions probably do increase your chances of viality, but go against my own blogging philosophy: Make it skimmable. Short paragraphs, bullet points, and bolded key phrases. Engage influencers. Reach out to people with large followings who might share your post. I don't do email marketing, other than if someone decides to follow my blog via email notifications.

---

"Viral" is hardly the only medical term that is now in broader usage. If you're curious about that, check out this other blog.

I was able to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home-studio complex a few years ago. It was started back in the early 1940s, but evolved over many decades.

The version you see in the Architectural Digest video below probably won't change very much now. It is quite different from the original design Wright and his apprentices initially built over their first six years of life and work in the Arizona desert. It went through a good number of changes after Wright himself stopped visiting in his final year, 1959.

Tour guides point out that Wright may not have "approved" of all the expansions, modifications, and renovations made by Wright's "disciples," though they say they were made in keeping with his vision.

Taliesin West may be "purer Wright" than some other more famous Wright buildings because it was not created for a client. No one was telling Wright what they wanted or creating deadlines. It was built with apprentice labor.

It's not the first Taliesin. The original was in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Taliesin West was a home, a studio, and most importantly, an educational institution. Wright and his students spent the winters there every year from 1935 on, though it was a completely undeveloped site at first.

The Wrights stayed at an inn, but the apprentices camped out on-site. They were building straight from plans that their teacher could have drawn up the day before. Eventually, it had plumbing and electricity, but it was still a communal architecture school.

There is also a 360 Virtual Visit online that lets you walk through and hear what you might hear on an official tour. Schools sometimes use this as a virtual field trip. There is even a bit more in this virtual visit than the tour I took in person. For example, visitors aren't allowed in the Blue Loggia because foot traffic would damage the irreplaceable Chinese rug, so they never see the balcony above or the rug up close.

120 years ago, divers discovered a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in Greece. What they found changed our understanding of human history, and the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism has captured the imagination of archaeologists, mathematicians, and scientists ever since.

The Antikythera Mechanism (c. 50 BCE) was found in a shipwreck off the coast of the island of Antikythera and is now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

It even inspired the plot for the 2023 film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The ancient Greek device was used to track celestial movements. In the fictionalized film version, it is called the Archimedes Dial and is said to locate fissures in time. The real Antikythera Mechanism was more of an early astronomical calculator. Not surprisingly, the movie takes creative liberties, turning the artifact into a tool for time travel rather than its historical function of predicting eclipses and tracking planetary positions

Using the latest 3D x-ray and modelling technology, experts are still unravelling the secrets of what else this machine may have been capable of calculating.

Could it be considered an early computer? Yes, it is sometimes regarded as the world’s first analog computer. Designed to predict astronomical positions, eclipses, and even track the cycle of athletic games similar to the Olympic Games. It uses a complex system of gears to model celestial movements, functioning much like a mechanical calculator.

Its sophistication was unmatched in its time, and nothing as advanced appeared again for over a thousand years.

Take a glimpse of the mechanism as it appears in this Hollywood version.

 

Originally posted at Kenneth Ronkowitz – poet, teacher, designer

A post on https://thehistoryoftheweb.com posits that 1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web. That's a debatable claim, but they have a point. It was a fascinating and turbulent year in general, as well as for the fairly new Web.

Look at some numbers. At the close of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. T the end of 1995, there were almost 75,000 and 700 new servers were being added to the web every day.

The web got a mention in The New York Times because it was new news. But the OJ trial was a bigger story. The White House got a website, but Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was also happening there. The Oklahoma City bombing was the major story of domestic terrorism. Windows 1995 was launched. The Palm Pilot was released.

The US Department of Justice was building a case for the 1998 lawsuit against Microsoft for what they called "monopolistic corporate maneuvering" because the company's Internet Explorer (trying to overtake Netscape Navigator) was free and bundled into Windows and didn't leave much incentive for competition.

If you're too young to remember Netscape know that by early 1996 that company had made a deal with America’s largest single online services provider, AOL Netscape pulled a Microsoft move and bundled a version of their browser directly into AOL’s platform and also did that with another big player at the time, CompuServe. In six months, Netscape had 10 million new users.

It was the start of the first of two "browser wars," but Internet Explorer ruled for almost a decade. Opera was released in April 1995, making it one of the oldest desktop web browsers to exist, but it never grabbed a large portion of potential users. Firefox 1.0 wouldn't appear until 2004, and Chrome came in 2008. Apple's Safari was released in 2003 but was limited to Apple devices, so it wasn't as big a threat.