Keeping Up With the ... (Insert 'Web' word staring with 'K' here)

I was talking to a friend the other day about the Harry Potter movies (she was laughing at 'you Americans' because I told her I had a ticket to a midnight showing on July 15/16) and I started remembering how I couldn't remember when I started reading the books. I know I pre-ordered the fourth book (and picked it up at 12:08 from the bookstore) but I couldn't tell you when I picked up the first. I'm pretty sure it was when I was working in a bookstore, and I'm fairly certain it was just before the whole series had it's global explosion. (That happened around the third book, right? The first two were well-recieved, but hardly revolutionary. For some reason, everything picked up steam about number three.) I've now got the whole series in hardback, a leather-covered limited edition version of the first book, the British version of the fifth book (also hardback, signed by J.K. Rowling herself), and I own one of the completely over-designed highly exclusive 'Beedle the Bard' 'all the money to charity' books.

What I'm actually wondering here is: how does something go viral? I can't imagine that the takeoff of Harry Potter didn't have something to do with the Interwebs, that there isn't some kind of intuitive technological pulse cycle that, if you hit it JUST RIGHT, means that you literally 'surf the 'Net' to success. When one person links a TED talk on their Facebook page, suddenly three more unrelated (except by me as a 'mutual friend') people post three more completely different talk videos. And it's not regular (like, every other day, or even once a week) it comes in phases. Is there some technology, some software to chart those phases?

I wonder if the instinct for Internet mobility is anything like working the Stock Market. If it's a matter of experience and 'feeling' trends, how can any one person possibly process that much information? It seems like a job that could only be done by computer (ironically). How often does something accidentally go viral, and how often does it require hours upon days upon weeks of carefully feeding the links and information into social networks? My brain is getting queasy just thinking about it.

I'm currently managing (or trying to manage) four blogs, three email accounts, a Facebook page, and a (rather sorry at the moment) website - and I get the feeling that I'm still a complete neophyte. I've got a sudden urge to go re-read 'Beedle the Bard'.

But hey - how often does the word 'neophyte' come up on your Twitter feed? Not often, I'm guessing.

Small consolation, that.

Time

I have this impression that time is soft, malleable, that it will expand (at least slightly) to accommodate by wishes. Even when it doesn't I don't change my vision of time, I acknowledge that I didn't schedule appropriately. Sometimes, though, time is hard and fast and shiny and slippery, and there's nothing I can do to slow it down or push it back. I wish I knew how to see time as non-linear in practice and not just conceptually, for times like this when the website should have gone live 40 minutes ago and it's still not ready and our tech genius is frazzled and there's nothing I can do to help. (I bought Diet Coke. I now know how to clear my browsing history so as to re-test the site. That's... all I've got. FOR NOW.)

When building an interactive theatre-experience website, give yourself at least an extra day to get things up and running. Make sure you do everything possible to de-stress your web designer, and learn Flash and other website-building technology skills (and figure out the ins-and-outs of web hosting/servers). The navigation "tree" is important to let everyone know how things are supposed to work, and having someone nearby to help test and at least a few other computers to upload videos would also be useful (as well as getting other team members trained on video-editing).

It's not that I'd like to go back in time, necessarily - but I would like to 'layer' time and go back to try this first project overlaid with the knowledge I've got now. (In many ways, a second project would be more encouraging, and probably just as educational - once the first experience has worked the bugs/process/methodology out, the second would be the place to explore!)

There is so much to learn. And by my own reasoning, there are at least a couple of websites to build before I can reasonably know what I'm doing. If I had video-taped the original process of building a website, I could play it back while working on the next... It doesn't exactly break time out of it's linear format, but it might be the closest I can come just now...

Hard at work... still...

Tools

I have a domain name.

I don't have a host yet.

I am very susceptible to suggestion - I'll probably (most likely) be purchasing Photoshop.

I ordered a book on website design.

Suddenly, friends are linking to TED talks ALL. THE. TIME. I don't have time to watch everything that looks interesting.

(Ming just gave me a dark-chocolate digestive biscuit. YUM.)

I feel lost, but not too discouraged - I fully believe that everything I'm trying to learn and everything we're talking about in Web Presence will come together and it will all be brilliant (particularly now that I know there are dark-chocolate digestives).

Maybe I should get that new laptop a little sooner than I had thought.

(I'm still not convinced to go Mac, though. My old-fogey flag is flying proudly, if in a slightly counterintuitive direction.)