A funny thing happened on the way to the weekend.

Reddit user JAugustus posted this Venn diagram of his own creation to /r/shakespeare with the caption, “Let The Arguing Begin”:

I’m way more interested in supporting and circulating original Shakespeare content (especially visually appealing content such as this) than I am about arguing his individual choices, so I put the image up on my Facebook and Twitter pages.

And then this happened.

I’ve never had a post go viral before, so it’s been fascinating to watch.  You just never really know what’s going to resonate and what won’t.  The reddit group didn’t really like the image and wanted to spend more time debating the actual tagging choices.  The creator of the graphic (who I have kept in the loop, I did not steal his work) was honestly surprised at the reaction it’s gotten. In the meantime it’s been shared 8000 times, over a million people had the potential to see it, and I picked up almost 2000 Facebook followers.

And that’s only Facebook. I put it out on Twitter as well and got dozens of RTs and hundreds of new followers. Nice numbers, but it still pales in comparison to the Facebook numbers.

I’m having fun digging into the data to try and get a clue why sometimes things go viral. On Twitter in particular you can see who RT’d you, and how many followers they have.  So I see numbers in the hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, boom, somebody with 23,000 followers RTs it.  Aha!  Then somebody with 11k.  And so on.  There’s an exponential element at work in things like this. It can get passed around a group of people and never really hit, until somebody comes along who literally has 100x the reach, and then it really starts to open up. It’s only a matter of time before somebody with 10x *their* followers sees it. Like the old saying goes, “…then they told 1000 friends, and they told 1000 friends, and so on, and so on….”

I hope all my new followers enjoy what we’ve got to offer!  Hello there! Welcome!

I mentioned recently that I’ve been taking steps to decorate my life with Shakespeare.  By that I mean, not just keeping all my fun stuff piled in a corner at home, but having stuff about me that will allow strangers to strike up a conversation.

I know I posted this on Twitter, but can’t remember if I updated you all with an image of what my computer looks like now:

(Yes, that is my daughter’s Barbie hanging out next to it.) Two people have already asked whether I could have made the Hamlet work so that he was contemplating the Apple, but I think it’s too big to make that effect work. Instead I positioned him to look like he’d just taken a chunk out of the Apple.  The real question is whether my ironic Lion King imagery comes through? 🙂

So this is the computer I carry around with me at the new office.  Today after a meeting, one of my coworkers who I have not really had a conversation with asked me if I was a fan of Shakespeare, which of course struck up the usual conversation.

Did I ever tell you my rule about asking me Shakespeare questions? I always tell new people, once you get me talking about Shakespeare, seriously, don’t feel bad about just walking away. Because I will not stop.

In the span of the next maybe 3 minutes we covered Commonwealth Shakespeare in the Park, Twelfth Night, Lear, how they handled the nude scene (he asked), how they handled the storm, The Tempest, why it is first in the folio but pretty much the last thing he wrote and how depending on which angle you take it tells you entirely different things about the play and the playwright (which, by the way, I might have to make a blog post about because I never really considered that before), Anne Hathaway (both the actress and Shakespeare’s wife), and Penn and Teller.

At this point the poor guy is sitting back down at his desk but I’m walking distance from him so I keep circling back to add something I just thought of.  After doing that two or three times I finally force myself to shut up because he probably doesn’t care about half the stuff I’m telling him at this point.

In other words it was awesome and I would do that a dozen times a day if people approached me :).