I know what you’re thinking, Balloon Boy is so two weeks ago, shouldn’t you be talking about snow?  Frankly, two feet of snow doesn’t impress me, but how the Balloon Boy story played out on the Internet is worth a look.

For those who missed it or managed to blissfully ignore the story, the short version is as follows.  A home-made balloon floated away from a home in Fort Collins, the balloon’s builder reported that his son was in the balloon, a chase ensued, the balloon landed on its own, but the boy was not on board, the boy was later found hiding in his house, and it’s now believed that whole thing was likely a hoax.

What’s this got to do with the Internet?  Lots:

Here at the office folks were using a Slingbox, which is a device that streams your satellite, cable or DVR to your computer over the Internet, to watch the live TV coverage.  The coverage was also being streamed live on various stations’ websites – 9news.com had its best day ever.

On Google “balloon boy” became the number one search term.

On Twitter it was the top topic.  You could watch as people tried to get Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame to calculate if the balloon was big enough to actually lift the boy (which it turned out not to be).  There were also countless rumors of the “heard from guy who knows someone who’s friends with the girlfriend of a guy at the FAA” type.

Literally hundreds of Facebook pages and groups were started.

Once the search was on a web site called whereisballoonboy.com appeared.

Before the boy had even been found there was a tee-shirt for sale, on shirting print-on-demand site Zazzle.

It turned out that the boy and his family had been on a reality TV show called “Wife Swap“.  Clips from the show, and even a rap video, quickly popped up on YouTube.

In the end, it’s just a silly, perhaps sad, little human interest story about people wanting fame.  Without the Internet, there would have been the live TV coverage, but most people would not have heard about the story until the evening news.  By then the boy would have been found, they possibility of a hoax raised, and the excitement gone.  But the real-time nature of the Internet drove the story, amplified the excitement, and turned it in to more that it was.

I’m not sure that’s a good thing…

This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.