“Twitter shovelware”: from 0 to 1,600 search results in six days

Here’s a bizarre example of just how connected the internet is. Six days ago I wrote a post about some Twitter experiments, and half-jokingly coined the phrase “Twitter shovelware“. I did a Google search at the time on the phrase to confirm that, indeed, the phrase threw up zero results.

On Monday, the piece was cross-posted at Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, and today, arrived in my inbox as part of their mailing list. So I decided to click on that link to the Google search to see, six days on, how many webpages had used the phrase and been catalogued by Google’s spiders.

I expected maybe ten or so – but 1,590?

Browsing through the results, it’s a very strong illustration of some truths about the internet. We are more networked, and digital reproduction is easier and more automated, than we realise. After the obvious results there are:

• pingbacks to the original post,
• websites syndicating RSS feeds from Poynter and the OJB.
• Websites syndicating or linking to blogs that linked to the original posts 
• reactions to those links
• Automated websites that build on top of content, any content
• People microblogging the post across two platforms
• ‘Recent articles’ listings (a feed within a site, effectively)
• Tags (and here) and categories
• Automated trendwatchers
• Bookmarks and Tumblr
• All the above in other languages, or on services hosted in different countries

And all this from a minor blog post that has only been viewed a fraction of 1,600 times. 

PS: At least one of those pages is the web equivalent of falling trees that only make a sound if someone is there to hear them, i.e. pages that are dynamically created only when someone clicks on a link to them, or at least is unlikely to ever be seen by human eyes. More food for thought.

UPDATE, JAN 2 2008: Three weeks on, the phrase now produces 26,000 results. Incredible.