The Hinterland
Rants from the hinterland. A Denver writer and pretend anthropologist rips into artistic treason and random acts of ethical violence.
May also contain gushes of enthusiasm.

Friday, June 24, 2005


Crying While Eating

There is an absolutely wonderful piece up on Slate, called Crying, While Eating. A first-person account from the founder of the site by that name, who's primarily a writer for a living, and it shows. The setup:

I had signed up for a "contagious media" contest. The rules: Make a (nonpornographic) Web site. Promote it any way you want, short of paid advertisements. The page with the most visitors after three weeks wins.

He and his partner came up with CryingWhileEating.com, which is exactly what it claims to be: a bunch of short video clips of people crying over oddball or mundane things, while eating.

And then:

Crying, While Eating launched on a Thursday night with 12 videos. Christy, who was drinking a vanilla shake, cried because she was "good at lots of things, but not great at anything." Tashi lamented the fact that "sex will never be that good again" while munching on Milano cookies. I ate buckwheat noodles with rooster sauce and blubbered about having "ruined Passover."

We waited until the next morning to send a batch of self-promotional e-mails. By the time we got out of bed, the blog Waxy had spotted our page on the contest Web site. From there, we got picked up by BoingBoing and Metafilter. I e-mailed the URL to a former co-worker in San Francisco that afternoon. He said he'd already gotten it from another friend in California, who had gotten the link from a guy in Austin, Texas. When I checked the stats that night, we had almost 50,000 visitors.

By May, they had 7.5 million hits.

It's a fascinating story about how and why web ideas travel, how certain quirky little sites become overnight phenoms.

I learned a lot. And laughed my ass off the whole way. I think you'll like it.
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