When Obama wins…
by Andrew CrowI’m never sure about how internet memes start, but this one started with a typo.
Dan was twittering something about Alabama, but wrote “Alambama”. He joked that when Barack Obama wins the election, certain states will probably be renamed – Alobama, Califobama, Nevama, Massabama, New Yobama. Of course, I thought that was hilarious and started thinking about other things that would change once Obama wins. So, a few of us started twittering silly little things, thinking of it as an inside joke.
Overnight, a few people caught on giving it a life of its own.
Jason Kottke took this and mashed it up to create this really cool microsite.
I think what interests me the most about these is how fast they spread. It’s been less than 24 hours and there are already over 500 tweets about it. Certainly taken on a life of it’s own.
You can also check out the blog that’s started from it and take a peek at the buttons Rachel made this morning.
Note: Adaptive Path remains purposefully candidate-agnostic, though a few of us have pretty strong opinions.
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May 9th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
[…] Andrew Crow’s blog post explaining how it started. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Obama Meets The LobbyIs This Our Guy?Super […]
May 9th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Actually it was Nancy Broden replying to Dan’s typo that got this all started
@odannyboy Alambama? Is that the Obamification of Alabama?02:42 PM May 08, 2008 from twitterrific in reply to odannyboy
May 9th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
[…] describes it well: It started with Dan mistyping Alabama as Alobama. The joke was that when Obama wins, […]
May 9th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Thanks Michael. I wasn’t trying to ignore Nancy’s input, and there were other things that led up to this. I didn’t want to write the blog post with things like “and then this happened, and then this, and then this, too”. Didn’t want it to sound like “and this one time, in band camp…”
But, credit where credit is due, just as Nancy’s comments to Dan are always fantastic, she certainly inspired us to write silly things and continue the joke.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Wow. Um, so your new meme got me thinking.
I *accidentally* wrote about a 2 page paper about memes, inspired by yours.
http://forums.city3.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1967
What do you think?
May 10th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Check out the trend for when obama wins on Twitter. That spike is your fault
BTW, Twist is a tool that my company developed to follow trends on Twitter.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
[…] as it turns out, the source, apparently, was innocuous enough: A typo. Dan was twittering something about Alabama, but wrote […]