The Anatomy of my Viral Video

A few days ago, I was sitting at my desk when my roommate, Scott, got my attention. I turned around to see that one of my cats, Sophie, had climbed up under her own steam and perched rather adorably on top of his head and was watching what he was doing on his computer. I, of course, thought this was hilarious, and managed to whip out my phone in time to capture a 1:15 long video clip of her sitting there and readjusting herself into a more comfy position.

I posted it on Facebook initially, then when people seemed to like it on there, thought I'd give posting it on reddit a shot. Reddit is one of my favorite websites and a pretty great online community, and until recently I'd just been a lurker (i.e. someone who views and upvotes/downvotes posts without contributing any content or comments of their own), but had recently been looking to change that. I posted it in a popular sub-reddit - /r/videos - and gave it an upvote boost by logging into a couple novelty/secondary accounts I've created, then sat back and estimated it'd probably get around 20-25 total upvotes. Boy was I wrong.

I posted it to /r/videos on Friday afternoon around 4:30pm, and by the end of that evening, I'd made the reddit front page. For those of you who aren't redditors, making front page is kind of a big deal on the site because of what it takes to get there. Your net upvotes (i.e. your total number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes people give you as well), on average, to make front page must be in the hundreds at least, and usually there's a pretty robust comment section accompanying these posts. What I think must have happened next - no actual data on this all-important bit - is that a redditor who thought the video was cute/funny/whatever tweeted the Youtube link to Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing fame. Xeni then posted the link to Boing Boing for their weekly Caturday post, people started viewing, retweeting, posting to their Tumblrs, and more, and everything kind of exploded from there.

I woke up the next morning to find that overnight, the video had become significantly more popular. If Youtube Analytics is to be believed (and I have some reservations about that, but more on that in a later post, probably), by midnight that night, it had gone from maybe a couple thousand views to almost 60,000, and was still climbing fast. I woke up to two rather remarkable emails – one from ABC News requesting permission to post the video on the Good Morning America website and asking for any editorial details I could provide, and one from a viral marketing group called Viral Spiral who were interested in helping me license and manage the video. To the former, I enthusiastically gave permission, and to the latter, I asked for more information out of sheer curiosity. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the thought of making money in this kind of way, so while their array of clients was actually pretty impressive (they currently help manage viral videos like Charlie Bit My Finger and that sneezing panda one), I never really had any intention of enlisting their services.

Over the next couple of days, I’ve watched my view count steadily rocket upwards as more and more sites linked to the video and as more and more people shared it on their FB pages, Twitter feeds, Tumblrs, blogs, or emails to friends. The video made the Yahoo homepage for a while earlier today, as this screenshot that redditor PDXracer messaged to me earlier shows. It has been posted everywhere from Digg to Laughing Squid to Kotaku, and I’ve seen it pop up on quite a few news and radio station websites. As I’m typing this, the latest numbers I have from Youtube are 894,576 views, with over 6,200 “likes” and only a little over 100 “dislikes” from the soulless troll section of Youtube users. My video is the most popular with males aged 25-34, and is most popular in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It has been watched in countries all over the world, from France to South Africa to Poland to Iceland to Russia, and of the 1,200+ comments on the video on Youtube, a good chunk of them are from people outside of the US. I suspect it’ll reach 1,000,000 views quite soon, if it hasn’t already.

I am so completely fascinated by this whole process it’s hard to even articulate exactly how and why. Everyone has, at some point, seen a viral video – a video that you tell your friends about only to hear “Oh yeah, I saw that the other day. It was hilarious/awesome/scary/(insert adjective here)!” I’ve seen quite a few myself, some when they’ve gone fully viral, and others in the initial stages, but never in a million years would I have believed that a 1:15 video of my cat sitting on my roommate’s head that I posted to one website would have joined the viral video ranks.

I’m not pretending that the video is going to have any kind of lasting impact whatsoever. That’s the nature of most viral videos – they explode in popularity and make people laugh for a short period of time, then something else comes up to supplant them. Sophie perching up on top of Scott’s head might not have any kind of major social impact, or make any kind of statement about society as a whole, but honestly, I’m just really glad that she could make so many thousands of people smile. :)

Creating an Online Presence

One of the things I've been beat over the head with over the last couple of years is the idea that in order to get anywhere you want career-wise in life, anywhere at all, you must create and maintain an online presence for yourself. There's a lot of wisdom in this assertion, and it's something I'm in the process of trying to do for sure. However, coming from a girl who has been halfheartedly trying to fill up the same paper journal since her 18th birthday - to be fair, I'm about 80% of the way there now - the idea of creating and maintaining a niche for yourself online that is creative, innovative, flattering, and professional yet full of your own personality is an almost insurmountable challenge. Even keeping this blog regularly has proved, at least over the last brutal quarter or two, to be more than I can handle.

When I check out the personal websites of people in professional positions I covet, at first glance, it doesn't look like it'd be too difficult at all to set up something similarly streamlined and professional-looking for myself! Minimalist webpage with my name as the URL, buttons to all my other social networking sites readily available (Facebook, Twitter, blog, my as-yet-non-existent Tumblr, the LinkedIn profile I haven't updated in at least a year, etc.), my resume and contact info, a mission statement, quirky About Me section, and what will hopefully eventually be a long list of projects I've worked on and/or contributed to in some significant way. But then, after thinking about it a little more, I realize that creating this online presence is kind of like getting in shape: the initial uphill struggle of setting everything up is a total bitch, while maintaining it comes more easily with a lot of time and practice, neither of which I've given much thought to over the past couple years.

I think part of it stems from the topic I addressed in my last post. I don't really know yet where I'd specifically like to end up. I know without a doubt that my primary goal is to work with people - my greatest joy in a workplace environment comes with bringing diverse people and personalities together and helping their creative gears turn smoothly by anticipating and filling needs. I'm not creative in the way that encourages individual creation of art or music or a product, but I'm a creative interpersonal problem-solver, and I also really enjoy finding people the information they need at any given time. I'd like to work with people who create, and who are passionate about what they do, since I am passionate about working with people like that. Only problem with this? I've never been in a position to do any kind of project management, and thus don't have a sexy Projects or Professional Involvement list to include on my resume.

So why not network, you say! Use the influence you gain via Twitter or other online media to create those kinds of opportunities for yourself! Easier said than done, I reply. At the moment, I am following 266 people on Twitter and have 171 followers myself (@katie_westlake). I've got this blog, which I try and update at least once every month or so, and there's always the myriad of other more subtle social networking methods you can use, like interacting with people over Facebook or Google+. And many of the networking opportunities I've participated in in the past (the lovely #libchat discussion that goes on every Wednesday on Twitter, for example) aren't as open to me as they once were because my focus is shifting further and further away from library work and more into...unknown territory. Much of the networking available to me right now is library-centric, and I feel a bit unsure as to how to proceed when I see questions geared around "In your library...", or when networking or professional development events pop up in my school email that are designed for job searching in the library world.

All that being said, I'm going to try and work a lot harder on developing and maintaining a solid online presence for myself. I'll recruit all the help I need to build an awesome website to showcase my accomplishments, whatever they'll eventually be, and I'll be posting a lot more on this blog, Twitter, and Google+. Might even start up a Tumblr, if it wouldn't be too hipster-y of me. The danger of doing this, of course, is figuring out how much of myself I can include in these things without being seen as unprofessional, but that's for another post. Right now, it's off to check the discussion boards for 580 and do some reading for INFX 543.

Decisions, decisions...

I wonder sometimes why it's so difficult for me to take an hour or so, sit down in front of my computer, and try to get some of the thought typhoon that's pretty much constantly spinning around in my brain out for the world to see. First sentences are hard, for one thing. Trying to find something me-related that's interesting enough to talk about is almost impossible, since life at the moment is a fairly unexciting mix of working at a job I keep solely to pay the bills and spending my evenings either doing homework, attempting to learn how to program, or browsing reddit. And the amount of things that interest me are too numerous to even know where to begin discussing them.

I've been having a hard time coming to grips with that last fact lately. I've never been the type of person to choose one thing to focus on since there are so many things I find completely fascinating, but while that curiosity has been a really good thing for the most part, it has definitely hurt me when it comes to choosing what I want to do with my life. I was sitting in class today at the UW with a room full of full-time residential students who were all talking about their Directed Fieldwork opportunities, their ideas for Capstone projects, and their choice of electives, and everyone sounded like they knew exactly what direction they were taking their degree. I went into my program knowing I wanted to go into either academic reference librarianship or library administration, but a year and a quarter in, I find I have no freaking clue what I want to do with my MLIS.

Working in a library still appeals to me, but not at all with the same intensity that it did after I graduated from Linfield and was dying to find a job I didn't hate. There have been a lot of things that have turned me off from pursuing a career in library work, which is sad to me, but it's okay. Working in a library would most likely be quite fun, but I think I'd be much happier working with libraries as opposed to within one of them. But where does that leave me in this degree? The vast majority of my classmates either already work in a library or want desperately to find a library job, and most of the classes are designed to help us along towards that end. I just registered last week for winter quarter classes, and honestly, I chose them completely arbitrarily.

The idea behind a successful career, or so I've been told my entire life, is to choose the one thing among many that you're most interested in, and chase after it with everything you have. My problem? I don't have a favorite interest. I like almost everything. Astronomy, chemistry, video game production, bartending, sound editing, writing, genetics, programming, book editing, architecture, owning a small business...the interest list goes on. Because I haven't devoted years of study to any one of these things, none of them are a feasible career option, since I'd be up against people who have done that and are therefore much more capable and qualified than me. And honestly, I don't know if I'll ever be capable of choosing one thing, which is a frightening thought when I think about the likelihood of ever getting a job that pays more than entry-level. I'd sure like to know what the hell I'm doing, but I don't know when (or if) that'll ever be an attainable state of mind for me.

Sorry guys, I didn't exactly plan for my first post in months to be so full of worrying. To make up for it, here's a picture of Sophie and Mal being adorable! :)

Sleeping with my windows open tonight \o/

Today was the kind of day I've been wanting to have for a very long time. Woke up relatively early after some crazy dream involving old people, car crashes, gun fights, and trains, dawdled around on the computer for a few minutes, then shut it off and headed out the door for some adventuring!

My wanderings took me first to grab some food along 45th, after which I walked through some really cute, quiet Wallingford neighborhoods down to Gasworks Park. It's almost impossible for me to do anything productive at Gasworks thanks to the amazing assortment of people parading around, and today was no exception. Highlights included watching a toddler meet her first golden retriever, seeing some kid totally eat it while running down the hill with a kite (he was fine...just a little grass-stained), watching about a million duck boats full of embarrassed tourists sail by, and nearly falling asleep in the warm grass only to get jolted awake by the sound of a full-size steamboat chugging about 30 yards offshore.

After a couple hours trying and failing to read, I decided to head to the UW and see if the libraries had anything interesting to take home, so off I went down the Burke-Gilman. Made a quick stop at the Wall of Death (yes, this is a real thing with some pretty funny Yelp reviews), then headed to Odegaard to find that almost everything I'm currently interested in reading had already been checked out. I've been wanting to get back on a China Mieville kick ever since I went to the reading/Mieville-lovefest that went down last weekend at Chop Suey, but I think I'll have to wait until my SPL holds come through. Boo.

After a quick dinner, I snagged some milk tea and headed back to Volunteer Park to wind down my day atop the water tower. The observation deck has some of the prettiest views of Seattle I've seen yet, and either no one knows about it or I've just managed to hit it at low-traffic times because it's almost always empty while I'm up there. There are three or four pretty comfy benches up there, so I commandeered one and settled in to watch the sun set over the city.

It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes I really wish I could press pause and just linger where I'm at for a while. Sitting in one of my favorite spots with a good book, feeling the slightest hint of a warm breeze swirl through the gated windows at the top of the tower, nice cold bubble tea within easy reach, no sound but the wind, birds, and panting of the crazy dude that ran up and down the stairs of the tower what must have been 7 or 8 times. It felt incredibly serene - I do love spending time with my friends on weekends, but there are some days where it's nice to not have to hold a conversation with someone, or worry about whether they're really truly okay with Thai food instead of Mexican, or inwardly lament the amount of money you're spending on alcohol because after you turn 21 that becomes the primary weekend social activity. I came down from the tower because I knew it'd be getting colder out as the sun fell below the horizon, but the whole way home, I wished I could just push that pause button and walk in the glow of the sunset through the streets of the city I love forever.

Oh yeah, and today I successfully finished my first year of graduate school. Almost forgot about that.

What Being a Librarianarchist Means to Me

A couple of days ago, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin posted an entry on his blog that discussed the future of the library, and in doing so, ruffled a massive amount of feathers across the librarian community. I saw a lot of derision towards his post, sparking statements like:

It’s always a little galling when a non-librarian tries to tell information professionals how to do their jobs. (from this post by Katy Stoddard)

or another zinger from Bobbi Newman:

But honestly I wish he’d just stop writing about libraries. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s a great writer, I think I own all of his books, but I think he should stick with what he knows, and clearly that’s not libraries.

Each blogger goes on to argue against Godin's apparent misperceptions of the basic responsibility of libraries to provide equal access to all types of library materials (and yes, the rabid defense of the book comes up yet again here), and each make some decent points. I saw a similar reaction from many of the librarians and library blogs I follow, and while I do understand where these sentiments are coming from, it was absolutely staggering to me that so many people that reacted in outrage missed the point of his post entirely.

P.C. Sweeney's post on the issue comes the closest to summing up my own viewpoint on the controversy raised by Godin's writing. I too think Godin hit the nail right on the head with his article, and while I would support some of the opposition in its defense of physical artifacts as valuable (and remaining so), I felt myself thinking Yes! Finally! Someone that understands that libraries are in a critical position right now, especially in the public eye, and that there's so much to look forward to in their future if people are willing to shift their perceptions of the function and purpose of a library! And what lends extra weight to his arguments, in my opinion, is the fact that he isn't a librarian. Like Sweeney wrote:

Remember that this guy isn’t a librarian at all. He is library user and an advocate for libraries. He is exactly the kind of person who should be telling us what a library is.

Bingo.

Godin's vision of the future of libraries is immensely exciting to me, and very much in line for what I picture in my own future as a librarian and information professional. His prescription?

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.
...
The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

He paints a picture of libraries as the "local nerve center[s] for information," which is a picture I've held dear to my heart since I was a kid, and one that gets even more vibrant the more time I spend in libraries. I see them as not just an institution to preserve the collective human body of knowledge, but as the keystone of any community and as a societal institution in the best place possible to promote the evolution and exploration of new and innovative ways for us as humans to interact with each other. The vast majority of the articles and blog posts and uproar I've been seeing about the death of the public library in the modern age has been primarily fueled by nostalgia - people that remember how libraries changed them as a child and want to preserve the same feelings of excitement and discovery they felt for future generations. This is all well and good, and I share in that nostalgia myself. But what I'm afraid of is that people will be so tied to that idea as solid grounds for the defense of libraries that they'll fail to see what Godin presents in his article - a widely shared public perception of libraries and librarians in the modern age that doesn't give two shits about your sentimental arguments.

Upon acceptance to the UW, I took on the Librarianarchist persona as a bit of a joke - I wanted to be the most badass librarian on the block, and help destroy the stereotype of librarian as fuddy-duddy. But now that I'm starting to understand where society stands on the role of libraries and how divided we as librarians and info professionals are amongst ourselves on where our efforts should be directed in the face of dramatic social change, I'm thinking Librarianarchist is starting to feel like more than a tongue-in-cheek moniker. The way I see it, in branding myself this way, I'm branding myself as someone that does have a deep appreciation for where things have been, but who is primarily concerned with shaking up those old perceptions and expectations and looking forward to where we could go. And that is immensely exciting to me.

Move Accomplished!

It's finally over! The move I've been anticipating/dreading/stressing out about for months is finally over. I'm now the proud resident of a beautiful studio on the corner of Boren & Union in downtown Seattle, and I couldn't be more happy about it. I walked to the grocery store and back last night (something I'll probably repeat almost daily), I walked to and from the office yesterday, and I've been getting an extra hour of sleep per night, which has made an enormous difference in how I feel during the day. I think I could get used to this. :)

School, once again, took a backseat during this period of dramatic change in my personal life, so I know I've got some catching up to do. Thankfully the readings and lectures this module seem to be a little less intense - trying to wrap my mind around the intricacies of metadata structure and the history/future of copyright during the same week on top of couch-surfing and preparing to move was a little too much to handle. I also failed to turn in an assignment, which I've never done before. It was just a quick exercise that wasn't worth a lot of points, but I still feel pretty terrible about it.

Speaking of class stress, I made the decision this weekend to not register for summer courses. I'd been contemplating taking Archival & Manuscript Services and Government Publications, both of which were being offered online, but after a lot of consideration, I decided I need a break. I don't want to burn myself out, and I can always take these classes later when they're offered again. Plus, I've got a lot of little side projects I've been wanting to work on, but haven't had the time, and taking the summer off would give me the opportunity to focus on something fun and creative for a while!

Okay, off to work. I'll try to keep a diary going of all the craziness I'm sure I'll run into living downtown, so look forward to those posts. Oh! And I also wrote another post for Hack Library School that should be up on Wednesday, so look forward to that too! The topic of choice this time around was LIS Overload (appropriately enough), and while I didn't get as in-depth as I'd have liked with the post, I'm hoping it'll be a good conversation starter on the site. I'll probably expand on my thoughts later in this blog.

The switch finally flipped!

Learning about LIS has, in more ways than I realized until just now, been less like learning about a new subject and more like learning a new language through immersion.

For the first two quarters, I found myself really struggling not just to understand the concepts and ideas being presented to me, but to really understand the vocabulary used to illustrate them and to figure out how they all connect to each other under the big umbrella that is LIS. I managed to do relatively well in most of the classes I took, but it felt a lot like when I was back in high school taking chemistry or physics or calculus - I knew how to do use the tools I was given, but I didn't really understand how or why they worked.

Then, all of a sudden, I realized about a week ago while slogging through the readings for 550 that holy shit, I'm actually getting this. The last week of readings and listening to lectures has been so much better than anything I've done so far in the iSchool because for the first time, I really feel like I'm at almost 100% comprehension and retention. I understand what we're talking about, I understand the relationships between the ideas and concepts we've studied in the past and how they relate to what we're doing now, and most importantly, for the first time I really feel engaged in the material. It's becoming less of a chore and more exciting than I could have imagined!

The parallel to learning a new language is uncanny. I've never had to learn a language through immersion, but from everything I know about how it works, it usually takes around six months for everything to click, and once it does, learning becomes so much easier and more enjoyable. Took me slightly more than six months for my own switch to flip, but even a week of this increased comprehension and engagement has more than made up for the six months of struggling to understand.

I really feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be now, and that's an incredible feeling to have. ^_^