Displacements
— film installation projects a rotating video onto a whitewashed room via justinsomnia.org #Trailer for Guitar Hero: World Tour on the Nintendo DS
— a terrible use of the license, Activision should be embarrassed #Add Art, Firefox plugin replaces ads with contemporary art
— built on AdblockPlus, the images rotate every two weeks via b3ta #Paper Console, Pong as a choose your own adventure book
— from the creator of Pac-Txt, a Python script that generates an 184-page book via b3ta #Tom the Dancing Bug on Disney's eternal copyright
— reminiscent of my own Mickey comic from 2003 via Boing Boing #The Native Faith of Donald
— Japanese insanity is leaking from Nico Nico Douga into YouTube; much more Japanese McDonald’s madness #The eleven-minute Automatic Mario masterpiece
— Super Mario World used as an instrument to accompany anime songs #Interview with the director of Weezer's "Pork and Beans"
— interviews from the video shoot will be coming soon on their YouTube channel #Grabb.it TV, the top 20 music videos for every week from MTV to Napster
— brilliant mashup wiring up YouTube and Wikipedia with the Whitburn chart data #Complete footage of Jason Scott's "Before the LOL" talk at ROFLCon
— whirlwind tour of the evolution of memes from the telegraph and Xeroxlore to modern day via ascii.textfiles.com #"Biggest drawing in the world" art project not real
— as suspected, the artist now says it’s a work of fiction at the bottom of his site #The Homebrew Channel, elegant homebrew launcher for the Wii
— new from the creators of the Twilight Hack; don’t miss the video via Delicious #Google offers permanent hosting for major Ajax libraries
— cached, minified, gzipped and up-to-date versions of jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and more #"We Are The World" performed by Japanese celebrity impersonators
— the Cyndi Lauper was pretty impressive #New York Times developing an API
— “Everything we produce should be organized data.” via techmeme.com #Philipp Lenssen on historical concepts of collective intelligence
— from the noosphere to smart mobs #Parchment, a pure Javascript Z-machine interpreter
— try some games from the IF Archive via evilbrainjono.net #Techdirt on Craigslist's ongoing battle with spammers
— what a mess; that blackhat SEO forum is depressing me #Biggest Drawing in the World
— using a GPS-laden briefcase to draw a self-portrait 69,000 miles long; I’m skeptical, but it’s a neat idea via Ze Frank #Weezer's Pork and Beans video is Internet meme madness
— riffs on nearly every major web meme; they even hired Afro-Ninja! #National poll estimates 18 million Americans have been Rickrolled
— probably higher, since the sample didn’t include anyone under 18 #Cactus. Cactus cactus.
— organized prank calling to a radio show by the PLA, professional trolls via encyclopediadramatica.com #Guitar Hero hacker plays Smells Like Teen Spirit without game console
— I’ve seen several mods turning the guitar into an instrument, but never seen a guitar solo on one via Hackaday #Philipp Lenssen on using hoax news to boost search rankings
— recent story about a teen paying for prostitutes with dad’s credit cards was a hoax to boost a finance site’s pagerank #Star Wars Kid: The Data Dump
This Friday, I’ll be speaking at the Webvisions conference in Portland about Internet memes, how they spread, and how their distribution’s changed over time.
As part of that research, I’ve been digging into my original server logs from the Star Wars Kid debacle, five years after I played a major role in what some say is the biggest viral video of all-time.
Be warned, this is more detail than you’ll ever want about the origins of the Star Wars Kid meme and how it spread. You don’t care about this level of detail, but I’m writing this all down so that I never have to think about it again.
In addition, I’ve decided to release the first six months of server logs from the meme’s spread into the public domain — with dates, times, IP addresses, user agents, and referer information. (Download it below.)
Early Origins
Like I mentioned in my original entry, the video was first released by Ghyslain’s schoolmates to Kazaa on April 19, 2003 with the original filename “ghyslain_razaa.wmv.” Within three days, it was being passed around in the offices of Raven Software in Madison, Wisconsin, where a game developer named Bryan Dube posted it on his personal website on April 22. Two days later, he created the first Star Wars Kid remix, adding lightsabers and sound effects in a new video titled “TheLastHope.avi.”
On April 27, a mostly-NSFW online community called Sensible Erection linked to the video on Bryan’s website. Later that evening, an SE user cross-posted it to a private file-sharing community I belong to with the new filename “star_wars_guy.wmv.” It quickly became the most popular file on the site, which is where I found it the following day, April 28 at 7:52pm.
On April 29, I renamed it Star_Wars_Kid.wmv and posted it to my site at 4:49pm — inadvertently giving the meme its permanent name. (Yes, I coined the term “Star Wars Kid.” It’s strange to think it would’ve been “Star Wars Guy” if I was any lazier.) An hour later, Scott Gowell becomes the first person to link to the video.
From there, for the first week, it spread quickly through news site, blogs and message boards, mostly oriented around technology, gaming, and movies. Throughout the life of the meme, most of the referers are blank, suggesting people were primarily sending the links by email or instant message.
The chart below shows the distinct top-level domains that appeared in the referral logs grouped by day.
It’s worth noting that the majority of sites sent less than 10 referers in that first month, and 21% of domains referred only one user. (Note: The chart below is on a logarithmic scale for both axes.)
Mainstream News Coverage
Here’s some of the highlights from the mainstream media coverage. The New York Times was the first major paper to report on it, almost a week after I tracked Ghyslain down, Jish and I interviewed him for the first time, and we started the fundraiser.
May 19, New York Times
May 19, Wired News
May 20, Public Radio International’s “The World” (radio program)
May 20, Globe and Mail
May 20, National Post
May 23, The Mirror UK
Jun 6, LA Times
Jul 4, The Independent UK
Jul 12, The Age
Jul 23, Wired News
Jul 25, BBC News
Jul 31, NPR w/Tavis Smiley (radio interview)
Aug 21, USA Today, syndicated Associated Press article
Aug 25, NBC’s Today Show (TV program)
Aug 26, MSNBC’s Countdown (TV program)
Aug 28, USA Today
Aug 30, Seattle P-I
Sep 8, SF Chronicle
Sep 15, Variety
Sep 16, Globe and Mail
Nov 18, CBS Evening News
Statistics
Here’s what the Star Wars Kid meme did to my overall traffic. At its peak, I received almost a million pageviews in a single day.
That includes all pageviews on my weblog entries. Isolating only the video downloads from my site, or later redirected to one of the mirrors, gives the following chart.
Download the Data
This file is a subset of the Apache server logs from April 10 to November 26, 2003. It contains every request for my homepage, the original video, the remix video, the mirror redirector script, the donations spreadsheet, and the seven blog entries I made related to Star Wars Kid. I included a couple weeks of activity before I posted the videos so you can determine the baseline traffic I normally received to my homepage.
The file is 158 megabytes — 1.6GB uncompressed — so I’m distributing it with BitTorrent. The data is public domain. If you use it for anything, please drop me a note!
Download: star_wars_kid_logs.zip.torrent
The New York Times' TimesMachine
— back after an aborted launch that I missed out on, this is great archival work #Jamie Livingston's Photo of the Day
— he shot a Polaroid every day until his death from cancer in 1997 via Delicious #Sneak peek at the new Last.fm redesign
— too early to judge, but a glimpse where they’re headed; announcement and more screenshots via MetaFilter #Slow-motion videos of people getting punched in the face
— background on the clips, shot at 1000 frames per second via Delicious #Offline Oracle Ouija Board
— summon the Internet spirits with a QWERTY layout and cursor control via Delicious #Huntington Hartford, kooky millionaire, dies at 97
— he blew $80 million of his inheritance on crazy schemes like a handwriting institute and automated parking garage #16% of US science teachers are young-Earth creationists
— they believe humans were created in the last 10,000 years; won’t someone think of the children!? via jwz #Chuck Klosterman's list of the most fanatical fanbases
— Tori Amos is at #2, which sounds right to me; nice gallery of uber-fans via spinner.com #Errol Morris reveals the backstory behind one Abu Ghraib photograph
— fake smiles, Weekend at Bernie’s, and the coverup behind a prisoner’s death during interrogation #Rory Root, owner of Berkeley's Comic Relief, dead at 50
— nice tributes from comic greats; the best comic book store I’ve ever seen, his passion was clear on the shelves #How to Use Nico Video
— Japanese video site from 2chan’s creator requires registration to view videos, so I’m slogging through it #YouTomb's tracking who ordered YouTube takedowns
— recent takedowns are on the homepage of the MIT project via Delicious #Web Trigrams, visualizing three-word phrases from Google's corpus
— gorgeous infoviz; more of his work from the massive dataset via numblr.nostrich.net #Garry Kasparov Griefed by Flying Penis
In a bizarre example of Second Life leaking into the real world, a political assembly on Saturday led by chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was disrupted by a flying penis.
Kasparov is a leader of the Other Russia movement, a loose coalition of activists opposing Vladamir Putin and the current Russian government. Over 700 people showed up for the event in central Moscow, but Kasparov’s speech was interrupted when a large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room. The Moscow Times attributed the prank to “a couple of pro-Kremlin Young Russia activists.”
Warning: Mildly NSFW images and video follow.