Before her April 11th appearance on TV's Britain's Got Talent, Susan Boyle -- a 47 year old spinster from a tiny village in Scotland with no job and no car -- was known only to her neighbors. Since her appearance, according to the Washington Post,
Boyle-oriented videos -- including clips of her television interviews and her recently released rendition of "Cry Me a River," recorded 10 years ago for a charity CD -- have generated a total of 85.2 million views. Nearly 20 million of those views came overnight.......A week ago I even posted a link to her seven minute video clip. Now she is famous for being famous, with newspapers picking up the story of her exploding fame.
Her Wikipedia entry has attracted nearly 500,000 page views since it was created last Sunday. Over the weekend, her Facebook fan page was flooded with comments, at some points adding hundreds of new members every few minutes. The page listed 150,000 members at 1 p.m. Friday. By last night there were more than a million.
The Internet is only twenty years old and YouTube is a lot newer than that. It is hard to believe that the speed of dissemination of information can have increased so much in so short a time. On the other hand, the Washington Post, which was once one of the great newspapers in the world, has eliminated its Business section and its Sunday book section and is beginning to look like a small town paper. Who knows what the information systems of the world will be like by 2050.
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