May 14
My 0.015 minutes of "Fame"
So my story starts 2 years ago, March 2006, when I visit New York City. I take a bunch of photographs, do all the touristy things, fall in love with the city and then come home.
Flash forward to April 2008, a little game called GTA4 gets released, some of you might have heard it being talked about. It takes place in a kind of pseudo-NYC called Liberty City. I noticed that there were a lot of great similarities between the real life and the virtual city, so I set about putting together a short little photoset of virtual recreations of the real life photos I took. It was fairly easy, because all the buildings counterparts are basically in the same position, and a lot of care and attention has been paid to getting the details in the game really right.
But anyway, so I think, cool, this is a fun idea, showed it to a few friends, they liked it, so I stuck it up on the website Digg.com. The idea with it is you submit images/stories/whatever and they get "dugg" by people who like it. About 12 hours after submitting the story, I see it got around 12 'diggs', and I'm fairly happy with that, I put it on a few GTA related forums and such, and go to bed thinking nothing more of it.
Then I wake up yesterday morning to find that the story had received around 1000 diggs overnight, became a Top 10 story, and got quite popular. So I think, "Well thats really cool, I might get some attention for my Blog and for Bodytonicmusic.com"....
Flash forward to this morning. I got up early to do a bit of exam revision, and checked on the Digg story....3000 diggs. Yikes, that's getting big. Then I do my regular morning routine of checking all my RSS feeds in Google Reader to see if anything interesting happened in the tech/news/music/game world overnight. I spit my cornflakes out when I see one of my most read sites, Kotaku, featured a story about my little photoset!
Big enough, I think. Not so, about 30 minutes later I get a call from a nice English fellow, asking me if I wouldn't mind if his publication used my photoset for a news story they were doing. Which publication? The Daily Telegraph.
So I'm thinking, well thats astonishing, I wonder what the impact on my Flickr stats has been. What do I see:
And what are my thoughts on all this? Why the hell didn't I put this on a page with ads!!
Great photo set and story. I like the spitting out of your cornflakes line when seeing your photos linked on Kotaku. I would have a similar reaction in your situation.
Did you get your GTA iV screen grabs on the PS3 or 360 version? In my experience, they are indistinguishable, but I am curious nonetheless.
Thanks again for the great photo comparisons. That had to take a bit of time.