I Owe You a #wotw2 Explanation

If you've been reading The Beat regularly you might have been a bit surprised by my posts yesterday. Here's the scoop:

On Halloween day, I participated in War of the Worlds 2.0. If you remember hearing about Orson Wells' first on-air reading of The War of the Worlds, you probably also remember that it didn't go so well. People though it was REAL because they came into the broadcast after the show started. Well, a fellow named Kris Kowal decided that this year we should pay homage to that first reading by re-enacting the whole thing on Twitter!

Now unlike the first reading, few people were probably frightened by the imaginary attack. It was also a bit different in the delivery. Instead of one story, there were literally hundreds of stories because each user who chose to participate added updates to Twitter that were relevant to their story.

Here's how it worked:

• The orchestrators of the event planned it out on a Google Doc that you could get access to if you wanted to help (which I didn't).
• Then they created a Twitter account named wotw2 that served as the timeline marker...to keep everyone on the same chronological page.
• Finally, everyone posted their updates in line with what was "happening" and tagged them with the hash code, "#wotw2."
  

How did the whole thing stay together? Well, you could search Twitter in a number of ways (I used Twemes) for the special hash code. In doing this I saw SO MANY other people on the network. It was a ton of fun and I met a lot of new Twitterers!

Specifically, one of my Twitter friends did a great job posting updates and I want to congratulate her on the great work! Here's a post summarizing her activities yesterday. If you want to see all my antics, just check out my Twitter feed and scroll back to Oct. 31st.

[Image from the wotw2 repository]