The Sourcerer

War of the Worlds 2.0 - The Post Mortem

Stuff's just beginning to trickle in reflecting on our Halloween reenactment of The War of the Worlds on Twitter. Here are some links to what we've found so far.

• The invasion status feed, @wotw2
• Search for participants using the #wotw2 hashtag.
• The Buzz Out Loud CNET podcast that Josh Lewis called into to advertise the event
• The Call of Cthubuntu, wherein Ryan Paul plugged the event on Arstechnica.
• Coverage from Wired's Underwire Blog
• Coverage from Ashville, NC
• Josh Lewis's video
• @RhythmHippy's doctored photos
• Flickr photos
• @MackReed's blog entry
• @sea_dot's blog entry
• @MackReed's retrospective blog entry
• @sea_dot's retrospective blog entry
• Archive of everything we could scrape when the event concluded and we realized we were going to want an archive to build cool visualizations from. The archive includes source code you can use to perform your own automated tweets in conjunction with @segphault's Gwibber microblog Python library.
• The tweet plan spreadsheet

Each participant averaged 2.6 tweets total. The most active participants posted 60 to 100 tweets. There were around 600 people following the invasion progress. That's about 1500 tweets for all participants over the course of the event. I think it's safe to assume that about 10,000 people were touched by these apocalyptic tidings.

Hopefully, we'll have a participation histogram (total tweet count for each participant) soon. I'd like to see a timeline integrating all of the media we produced.

That was a lot of fun. We'll have to do something similar again some time.