My individual project

I've been struggling with how to put together an individual project (in addition to really settling on something that I would enjoy), when I came across a CNN article on a guy that was analyzing dreams via Twitter.

I don't really understand Twitter, but I thought about how great it would be to have a site where people could submit their dreams, similar to Postsecret's site (which is nothing more than a blogspot as well!). I named my idea "Such stuff as dreams are made of..." (geek alert!) from a quote from one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, The Tempest.

What I did was start a blog, so there would be somewhere to dissect and discuss any dreams I found to post. Since I didn't have any immediately, I also embedded a few youtube videos. I also started a twitter account for this project and linked the RSS feed of the twitter account into the blogspot page.

What really got this project rolling was when I created a facebook group page. Before the last two weeks in this class, I had never created a group facebook page, but now I've created one for this project and my two group projects. Since facebook is the hub of social activity right now, it seems like this is the best place to plug in and get people. I asked classmates to join the facebook group page and I posted it on my facebook status as well. Initially, I got about 13 people to join the page. Then, suddenly, overnight, that number doubled. I don't even know about a third of the people in the group. Facebook is such a social network that friends of friends were joining the page because they saw the link in their feed that a friend had joined the page.

What this shows me, since my interest in Postsecret was that there are so many websites that become popular through word of mouth (People of Walmart, Cakewrecks), is that is it very easy for a site or idea to gain some momentum fairly easily. The really neat thing on the facebook group page for "Such stuff as dreams are made of" is that people really did start posting dreams and nightmares they had. So I was able to take real dreams from members and put them on the blog.

Obviously, this concept is still in the infantile stage since I have held back from really pimping it out, but I think this might be something that I will play with this summer in a goal to see how many people really will join this group. I'm amazed at how social networking really has a snowball effect (I remember when "Can This Pickle Get More Fans than Nickleback" was running rampant; they did achieve their goal in the matter of a week or so).