Goldblum and the Rumor Mill

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Twitter has had a pretty big June. All across the United States it became nearly synonymous with the civil unrest following the Iranian elections and then switched gears (a story within itself) to spreading the news of a string of high-profile celebrity deaths. The news of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and then Billy Mays dying within a week was almost too much for the internet.

While the speed that Twitter can spread information is nothing new, it was interesting to see during all of this how quickly a little lie could spread.

On last Thursday Michael Jackson related tweets peaked at 22% (http://www.twist.flaptor.com/trends) of all the day’s tweets. That same day, a rumor about Jeff Goldblum dying took up 2% of all of Twitter (still a staggering number of tweets) before it died out.

Goldblum happily made a rather amusing appearance on the Colbert Report last night to deliver his own eulogy (and to plug his new show). Watch the clip and remember that wildfires have nothing on social media.