I woke up this morning and had a look at Twitter (as you do). To my surprise, I saw this:
@web_goddess bahh! @neilhimself posted a link to your Dahl site (measles piece)! lol! 🙂
– miftik (@miftik) February 2, 2015
Wait, what? Neil Gaiman tweeted a link to my site? I went in search.
Heartbreaking and wise Roald Dahl letter to his readers about measles and his daughter Olivia. http://t.co/MdgLiLAMlb (via @timminchin)
– Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) February 1, 2015
Wow. He really did! Turns out he got it from Tim Minchin. (Tim, of course, wrote the music for “Matilda”.)
So here’s the very sad #oliviadahl letter again: http://t.co/viSDnWgpWU And now I’m off to have hot chocolate with my vaccinated kids.
– Tim Minchin (@timminchin) February 1, 2015
I discovered pretty quickly that a LOT of other people had picked up the story. They were all linking to this letter from Roald Dahl about why you should immunise your children. His daughter Olivia died from measles encephalitis. I posted that letter on the site about two years ago and then completely forgot about it. I’ve actually been following the story of the recent Disneyland measles outbreak with fascination (don’t even get me started on those stupid, stupid “anti-vaxxers”) and never remembered there was a big tie-in to Dahl. But somehow over the past three days it blew up in a really big way.
See? I’m still not sure who actually started it. People have been tweeting links to the page off and on for the past two years, but the most recent one that could have started the avalanche was this one from Charles Simmins. On the 30th someone wrote about the issue on Daily Kos. Was that where it picked up steam? Kottke tweeted about it, but it didn’t really go nuts until Tim Minchin and Neil Gaiman picked up on it. It spread to Facebook where it’s still trending. At some point the folks at the official site got wind of it and started emailing and tweeting sites, suggesting they instead link to the page on their site instead. (Fair enough. They contacted my site too so I happily put a note on the page.) Right now lots of sites are still writing about it but most are just reproducing the text themselves. So while my site did get a really big spike – about 10x its normal traffic – I suspect it’s not as big as it could have been. In the end most of my traffic was from Twitter and Facebook, where folks mostly don’t bother to go back and change links to things. And I’m still getting some clicks from sites like Get Off My Internets, Refinery29, Reddit, and even Metafilter.
So there’s my 15 minutes of Internet fame for 2015, I guess!