Jonah Peretti

You are currently browsing articles tagged Jonah Peretti.

From Felix Gillette’s smart new Businessweek article about the Internet buzz saw that is Buzzfeed, a passage on company co-founder Jonah Peretti, who sees the site as a psycho-sociological experiment, and one of his influences, Stanley Milgram:

“Peretti, 38, has a knack for coining clever Web neologisms. Among the keys to achieving success on the Internet, he says, is deploying ‘Big Seed Marketing,’ optimizing ‘Viral Lift,’ using a ‘Mullet Strategy,’ and catering to the ‘Bored at Work Network.’ ” He sees himself not only as a businessman but as something of an applied scientist, testing the theories of 20th century academic sociologists vs. the contemporary data of the social Web.

To understand some of the principles underlying BuzzFeed’s strategy, he recommends reading The Individual in a Social World, a 1977 book by Stanley Milgram, who is known, among other things, for his experiments leading to the six degrees of separation theory. ‘When some cute kitten video goes viral,’ says Peretti, ‘you know a Stanley Milgram experiment is happening thousands of times a day.’

Peretti grew up in Oakland, Calif., graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1996 with a degree in environmental studies, and spent a couple of years teaching computers and Web publishing to high school students in New Orleans. After co-writing a number of papers for academic conferences (‘Historical Role-Playing in Virtual Worlds: VRML in the History Curriculum and Beyond’), he matriculated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master’s degree from the Media Lab.

In 2001, inspired by reports of substandard working conditions at Nike (NKE) factories, Peretti ordered a pair of custom Nike sneakers decorated with the word ‘Sweatshop.’ The company refused to fill the order, and Peretti got into a theatrical back-and-forth with a customer rep on e-mail. Afterward, Peretti e-mailed the document to 10 acquaintances, who passed it along to their friends. The whole thing snowballed. Overnight, Peretti became an Internet sensation. NBC flew him to New York to appear on Today.

Peretti walked away from the Nike affair a presumed expert on the explosive Internet phenomena now known as viral media. Writing about his experience for the Nation in April 2001, he theorized, ‘In the long run this episode will have a larger impact on how people think about media than how they think about Nike and sweatshop labor.’ He speculated that by understanding the dynamics of ‘decentralized distribution systems and peer-to-peer networks,’ new forms of social protest would emerge and challenge the ‘constellations of power traditionally supported by the mass media.'”

••••••••••

Stanley Milgram’s 1962 experiment, “Obedience”:

Tags: , ,

Boing Boing editors David Pescovitz, Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow and Mark Frauenfelder. (Image by Dave Bullock.)

Boing Boing, the king of personal blogs that aspire to any level of cerebralness, is sort of an accidental giant. It started as a tiny print zine during the ’80s and became the least likely giant-traffic blog on the web. In an article for Fast Company, Rob Walker profiles the four principals behind the site. An excerpt:

“‘Boing Boing is a holdover from a time when the best blogs were written by smart people who posted whatever was interesting to them,’ observes Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed. Sure, there are still many such blogs around, but the blogosphere overall has changed radically, with the dominant players falling into recognizable categories — tech (Gizmodo, Engadget), gossip (TMZ, Gawker), politics (the Huffington Post, Politico) — and generally created by teams of professionals looking for growth and profits. ‘The new generation of postpersonal blogs,’ Peretti adds, ‘are much bigger.’

Yet boingboing.net remains among the most popular 10 or 20 blogs around. According to Quantcast data, it gets about 2.5 million unique visitors a month, racking up 9.8 million page views, a traffic increase of around 20% over 2009. It attracts blue-chip advertisers such as American Express and Verizon. It makes a nice living for its founders and a handful of contract employees.

And what really makes it interesting is that it does this with a mix of material that remains as eclectic, strange, and sometimes nonsensical as the obscure personal blog it started out as. Sure, the site offers its take on big, hot-button topics like WikiLeaks or the latest Apple gadgetry. But just as prominent are headlines such as ‘And now, an important message regarding elves,’ or ‘Heavily stapled phone-pole,’ or, to cite a recent favorite of mine, ‘Monkey rides a goat’ (an animated GIF of exactly that).

How can this mishmash command an audience of millions? Particularly now, when the ‘postpersonal’ blogosphere offers slick, focused, comprehensive takes on any subject you can imagine? Maybe the founders’ insistence on keeping the site weird, loose, personal, and fundamentally unprofessional is exactly what keeps the crowd coming back. Boing Boing’s longevity hasn’t happened despite its refusal to get serious, but because of it.”

Tags: , , , , ,