Bumped from the diaries -- Jonathan

(I blog at RunObama.com)

Chris higlighted Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Forum's Tech President on his post on the Obama 1984 YouTube video earlier today. The 1984 Obama video has exploded across the internet in the last week, hopping from 100,000 views last week to almost 400,000 at around 2pm today. At 11:56pm it has 748,546 views (though I suspect there's a bit of lag in YouTube updating since it was also at that number at 11:02pm).

A second copy of the video (not the original), the one that the Drudge Report is linking to, now has 240,131 views. That's over 988,677 views. Technorati tracks over 1,040 blogs linked to the video (both copies) now.

Following the anatomy of this viral explosion today is fascinating.

Much of the attention was galvanized by the article in the San Francisco Chronicle that came out today on the video. Major blogs that posted on the video's article within the last day included Political Wire, Kevin Drum at Political Animal/Washington Monthly, TPM Cafe, the Gothamist, Mediabistro, and many more (and growing). In a huge indication that it's spreading outside of the political blogosphere, I even saw it posted on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), the go to blog for Apple news. And not to mention the mainstream attention brought on by the Drudge Report and Time.com's the Swamp, where it "wow"ed the ever-constant barometer of conventional DC wisdom, Joe Klein.

But why this trend?