Viral solitude – updated

How a video goes viral:

Sullivan TweetSometime on Wednesday, Halifax filmmaker Andrea Dorfman uploaded her lovely video, featuring Tanya Davis’s poem about solitude, to YouTube.

At 6:38 a.m., Friday, when Halifax artist Shelagh Duffett reposted the video to her website, it had been viewed 40 times. Kimberley Mosher, an account manager for a Halifax Advertising agency, saw it on Shelagh’s site and put it on her Facebook page, where, in turn, fashion blogger Allison Garber saw it and reposted the link to her FB page. All this happened in less than three hours.

Allison’s and my mutual friend (and brilliant, Baddeck-based communications strategist) Stacey Pineau sent me the link at 9 a.m. Acting the slowpoke, I didn’t get the video onto Contrarian until just before noon. By then, it had been viewed more than 600 times. But I also sent it to Andrew Sullivan, whose Daily Dish blog at The Atlantic magazine’s website is phenomenally popular. Sullivan published it the following day, Saturday, at 2 p.m.

About eight p.m. Saturday night, celebrity film critic Roger Ebert tweeted the link with a melancholy note hinting at its appropriateness for a Saturday night.

Ebet Tweet
Now I am only speculating, but I suspect Ebert saw the video on Sullivan’s blog. By Sunday morning, three days after Dorfman uploaded it, more than 100,000 people had seen How To Be Alone. As of this posting (5:49 p.m., Tuesday), the tally stands just shy of 190,000. As of Wednesday noon, it has 273,899 views.

In case you are wondering, Dorfman and Ebert have a Bacon number of three.