Testing e-mail’s viral capacity, a ninth grader in Mississipi e-mailed 23 people on January 13 asking them to e-mail their location to her at howfastorfar2003@aol.com and to pass her message along to their friends. By February 5, the girl was getting 1000 e-mails every 29 minutes, one minute faster than she could download them. After Shannon mercy-killed her account, people tracked down her phone number and called to explain they couldn’t e-mail. Her total: 160,478 e-mails from 189 countries and 50 states. (WSJ password protected.)

We’re still absorbing the Internet’s true human scale. The world’s most trafficked tourist attraction, the Eiffel Tower, sells 2 tons of tickets a year. But its total traffic since 1889, 204 million people, is probably less than Google gets in a week.

I drove to Cambridge last night to attend a powpow convened by Dave Winer, the blogging innovator and evangelist who has been invited to agitate (or meditate?) at Harvard for a year.

Dave is as pugnacious in person as he is in pixels. He exhudes relish at his potential role as a blogging Socrates inside the crimson polis along the Charles River. Since blogging topples the walls that sustain entrenched geographic and geneological networks — and what is Harvard but a factory for networking elites? — I suggested that Dave may be a “jackhammer inside the Ivory Tower.” He responded that a good tower has room for a jackhammer.

Dave ran the meeting like a blog, bouncing around, cutting off wandering threads, even playfully browbeating one participant (“Bob”) who apparently regularly over-speaks around Dave. (“You only get to talk two times tonight Bob. Is this going to be one of them?”)

I learned more about RSS, and have to look more at the SMBmeta project, which involves creating a small-business-specific xml format.

Only two of the fifty-odd attendees were women. One of them, Donna Wentworth did a heroic job blogging the event. Dan Bricklin has posted a short account and photos of the event, including one I shot. His camera was incredible, making the room seem far brighter than it actually was. Dan says he gets 150 visitors a day to this page from Google for people looking for “home network 802.11b.” I suggested he sell blogads; in response, he joked “not unless I lose my job.”

Hylton Jolliffe quietly rounds up the different accounts of the event.

Ken Layne’s list of things to stockpile for the apocalypse includes: “500 lbs of ice. That should last a few days. 200 fresh oysters, beneath the ice. And a shucking gizmo. Condiments: lemons, Tabasco, horseradish, Tapatio, olive oil, etc…. Manual typewriter, index cards and a wind-up clock. Blogging will be impossible if it gets really bad. So I’ll just type my posts and do a time-stamp and pin the cards on the wall … in descending order.”

Publishing ads on nothing but his bare chest, web entrepreneur Chris Pirillo has netted $940 since January 22.

Chris, blogger, TechTV pundit and publisher of tech tips newletter Lockergnome, has sold 47 ads at $20 a piece.

If the formula for postmillennial publishing is low-overhead individually-generated content distributed to millions through the Internet, aka “the medium is me,” Chris takes the trend to an extreme.

Always eager to experience “thin media,” I Paypaled Chris $20 and bought an ad for Blogads. I also mailed Chris some questions:

> If you’ve got 10 minutes free, I’d love to ask you a few
> questions.

Feel free to ask more. 😉

It was inspired by several ideas, really. Chiefly, by something I did on the show I do every day for TechTV. I lifted up my overshirt and made reference to a video collection called “Girls Gone Wild.” One particular online community (Leoville) was rather upset at the message this might have been sending to young women. So, for my apology, I spelled out their web site on my chest and left it in my webcam for the world to see.

I also did it to prove that I could prove somebody wrong. He used the term “viral marketing” incorrectly, and instead of admonishing him publicly, I thought I’d illustrate my point by creating something that had stronger potential to go “viral.” It’s always a craps shoot, but the more zany an idea is, the more potential it has for spreading.

Beyond that, I’m just a goofy guy who loves to do goofy things. I’ve been doing goofy things for years, but this is the first one that had mass appeal. Although, I’m still not sure why.

> In brief: When did you start?

A couple of weeks ago (rentmychest.com was registered on January 22nd). I called up my buddy Jake Jake) and told him to register it and I’d explain it later. I’m nutty like that.

> How many ads have you sold?

I believe 47 at the time of this interview. That’s approximately US$940, not including PayPal fees. And yes, I do have a handful of repeat bustomers. One guy used it to freak out a close friend (in an innocent way), another guy is using it to promote his personal Web site, and a very close friend (Jodie Gastel) is using it to create awareness for her services at ScoreBrowniePoints.com. She reported record traffic, being the fourth bustomer, and came back for more.

> How many page views does Rentmychest.com get?

I don’t know. 😉 How’s that for a statistic?! I threw up a counter at the bottom of the page, and anybody should be able to click it to get more data. I guess I don’t care; I’m having far too much fun to get too serious about it.

> What is the best / worst advertiser feedback you’ve gotten?

Best? Jodie. She wanted to be the first bustomer, but she missed her opportunity, and then it didn’t matter… until the second and third sale trickled in. I finally convinced her to take the plunge. It paid off.

Worst? I can’t think of one. I’ve had no complaints so far. I’m writing crap on my chest, for chrissake. 😉 People pretty much know what they’re getting into, click-thrus or not.

> How does your wife feel about them?

She tolerates them, as she tolerates most of my stupid ideas. I don’t think she thought it was a “great” idea when I first proposed it, though. “You think people are going to pay for that?!” Yeah, I did. And yeah, they did. Who’s laughing now? Anybody who’s visited.

> Where are the photos taken?

Right here in my living room, where I have “geek central station” set up.

> With what camera?

It’s a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000. It takes decent pictures for the job (640×480). I open my image editor, use TWAIN to capture the still, wash my chest, and move on to the next one.

There’s a new blog focused on Berkeley. Says the creator: “I am happy to give blog authoring privileges to anyone who lives in Berkeley, and who commits to write about issues, events, and news that are directly related to Berkeley. People add entries as they please about Berkeley stuff, and we end up with a local weblog. Will it be as simple as that? Undoubtedly not, but it seems like a reasonable place to start.” The idea was spawned by Peter Merholz.

I’ve been talking with friends in Amherst about doing similar here, so will be interested to watch the idea closely. When I first mention the idea, people say “but we’ve got a newspaper.” Point out that having your “own” blog would mean you could write about that zoning issue that is driving the neighborhood crazy, or that soccer field mess, or the true price of multi-lingual education… and eyes start to light up. “Oh” becomes “WOW.” As blogging and broadband spread and the local news hole continues to erode in print, this is a model to watch and nuture. (Via Gawker.)

Clay Shirky continues to attract attention with his argument that blogs are a scale-free network; in rough terms this means that a few blogs get most of the traffic and will accelerate away from their peers to become mainstream media. Clay floated this idea on the NowEurope list many months ago and has made it several times recently, most fully here. Here’s my take:

Clay’s argument that ‘the blogosphere is naturally elitist and will soon generate its own strata of mainstream media’ contains two generalizations that should be untangled.

a) Yes, Clay is probably right that 5% of the blogs will always account for 50% of blog traffic. But it is wrong to talk about “The” blogosphere. We’ll certainly have hundreds of blogospheres, each with its own elite and power law distribution. And we don’t need to worry about stasis any time soon. These new spheres will be emerging for a long time. Glenn Reynolds obviously won’t be the hub for French bloggers, and BoingBoing won’t be the hub for evangelical Christians. New bloggers will invent and serve new spheres.

b) Clay suggests that because mainstream media is elitist (ie governed by the power law), all elitest media is mainstream media. “As we get used to weblogs, they will become mainstream media too, and will take on the trappings of mainstream media,” he says.

Sure the blogospheres may each display elitist traffic distrubutions and may not be able to link to everyone. But Clay’s equation of blogs and mainstream media elides the many traits — links, chronology, personality, blogrolls, 95% lower overheads, Google-friendliness, trackbacks — that make blogs different from (and subversive of) today’s dominant media, aka “mainstream media.” Lumping the two classes of media together is like declaring, 1.5 million years ago, that “homo erectus shares traits with the ape, so we can safely ignore their differences.”

What makes blogs unique? I’ll advance the argument that a key difference between blogs and today’s media is corporate structure. As media organisms, blogs have shorter life-cycles, smaller metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit new media challenges. Weird, subversive, new things will come to pass.

If you’re still reading this post, you might enjoy Albert-László Barabási’sLinked: The New Science of Networks, or at least my review of it.

I trudged out through six inches of snow just before lunch to retrieve the mail and got a nice surprise: the prototype for the Los Angeles Examiner, still toasty after its flight from the coast. What a buzz to hold this thing, this bastard spawn of blogs and print.

My favorite line comes in a story about waiting in line to get into trendy LA nightspots. “This embarrassing sidewalk is the Majave Desert and her clipboard is the only canteen of water for miles.” The comment from Nick Yulico on this page on the LAExaminer blog turned into the “Angelenos are Pansies” letter to the editor. On the Nuptials page — my favorite spot in most papers — we read about the not-so-recent union of Angelenos Emmanuelle Richard and Matt Welch.

I look forward to reading lots more of the gab, grub and grab of LA life as reported by the guys the Economist calls “Messrs. Layne and Welch.”

Noting that Jim Romenesko changed his media blog’s name from MediaNews to Romenesko after threats from the MediaNews newspaper group, Jeff Jarvis concludes this is a “smart move.” After all, “he’s the brand.”

With blogs leading the way, maybe we’re headed back to the days when businesses are named for their owners. Heinz, Levis, Merrill, Merck… these businesses were built from the blue-print of one individual’s integrity and passion.

Wearing my Pressflex hat, I talk to publishers every week who think their own couple of sysadmins can whip up a great site. (“Gee, my cousin built a web site in one weekend, how hard can it be?”) I check back six or nine months later, and these guys are usually still siteless (and sightless.) For anyone intoxicated by the idea of “cheaply” building their own app rather than using something that has been user-tested, this page paints a sobering picture.

“EBay hosted 300,000 used-vehicle sales last year. That’s just a sliver of the estimated 43 million used vehicles sold in the U.S. But in a highly fragmented market, eBay’s tally makes it among the largest used-car sellers in the country,” reports WSJ.com.

eBayers are willing to buy cars that are 1000s of miles away, sight unseen. They trust what they are getting. “Sellers often photograph their vehicles in copious detail because dealers who unload lemons through the site risk having their ‘feedback’ — a permanent rating left by buyers — tarnished by disappointed customers.”

No wonder eBay is mopping up in used cars. If you’ve ever haggled with a used car salesman, the opportunity to give the dude feedback in front of 60 million other buyers is exhilerating.