The sudden and widespread attention given to the “Vote Different” video clip (also sometimes referred to as “Obama 1984″ or “Hillary 1984″ ) is a dramatic example of the sort of tipping phenomenon that the course is beginning to cover. On YouTube, the commercial has now been viewed almost 3 million times, which doesn’t count the tens of millions who have watched it on nightly news programs and cable news channels.

For those unfamiliar with the video clip, the commercial was an edit of Apple’s 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh computer***, where the creator, Phil de Vellis, replaced Big Brother’s droning rhetoric with video of Hilary Clinton beginning her “conversation with America”. A woman wearing an Obama campaign logo throws the sledgehammer into the screen. The clip ends with an image that contains Barack Obama’s website address.

There appears to me to be two different surges of attention - one quick viral surge from politically-centered areas (immediately sending views into the hundreds of thousands), but also a distinctly different second surge as it attracted the mainstream mass media (sending views into the millions). I focus on the second.

In a subsequent interview with YouTube, de Vellis mentions Adam Conner’s coverage of the spread of the video. Viewing the data afforded by the posts can reveal some hints as to who are - and aren’t - the major players - the Connectors and Mavens - in tipping the video into the consciousness of the mainstream news media and onward to the general masses.

The video was posted on March 5. By March 7, it had 100,000 views and had caught the attention of Micha L. Sifry at techPresident, who was already describing it as a viral video, at least in YouTube terms. Micha Sifry revisited the video on March 19, and it had somewhat more than 300,000 views. Although he describes it as being “really hot on YouTube”, hindsight reveals how lethargic the growth was - in the 12 days between the articles, it received an average of about 17 thousand views a day, paling in comparison to the hundred thousand in received in the first two days.*

Sometime around the 19th, something made the video tip (again). Adam Conner pegs the view count at 400,000 at 2PM on the 19th. By 11PM, less than ten hours later, it had reached nearly 800,000.** The next day, March 20, CBS’s The Daily Show’s Harry Smith had written about it, marking its views at 900,000. It was broadcast on the CBS’s Evening News that same night, already up to “more than a million” views on YouTube. The video went even further mainstream by March 21, when the Associated Press ran a story, pegging the view count at 1.5 million.

More than half a million views a day? What caused all this attention in the mainstream media?

As we have learned before, “weak links” are most likely to occupy the niche of bridging. Adam Conner attributes the leap to a March 18 San Francisco Chronicle article by “Carla Marinucci, Chronicle Political Writer”. Conner lists two more distinctly-political arenas, but we can note how close they occupy bridging roles into the mainstream media: The Drudge Report, which is described by ABC news as “set[ting] the tone for national political coverage”, and Time’s The Sludge, where the link with Time Magazine is clear.

Further, we can definitely see how some sites are not the bridging points: those which publicized the video on March 5, the initial posting date. According to Garance of TAPPED (as quoted in Conner’s article), blog appearances on March 5 were “pro-Democratic sites” like MyDD and TalkingPointsMemo. He also traces the word-of-mouth chain from de Vellis (the creator) to TalkingPointsMemo - friend of a friend, only two strong connections. This clearly illustrates how bouncing around in a strongly-linked component may get everyone in the component to see the video, but it needs a weaker link to get outside.

Another hint of the transition may be the shift from coverage of the clip itself and coverage of its spread. While the CBS news clip and The Sludge both discuss the implications of the clip on how the 2008 elections will look, the earlier posts seem to deal much more with the mystery of the author. This again suggests how weaker relationships take topics farther -articles on the same exact topic are less likely to be passed on to new people.

For Micah L. Sifry’s two coverage pieces: http://www.techpresident.com/node/130 and http://www.techpresident.com/node/159

For Adam Conner’s analysis: http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/3/20/13319/9340

For the original video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo

* The article implies that there was a noticeable rate increase already by the time it was posted - factoring this in, the average view count between the two surges would be even lower.

** I assume that “11:56 PM today” refers to the night before the March 20, 2AM timestamp.

*** According to the aforementioned TAPPED post, the video is actually an edit of a 2004 remake, as can be seen by the iPod worn by the woman who throws the sledgehammer.