Bob Barker on WWE, you didn’t know?
I’m taking a social media class, and we have been assigned to blog at least twice a week with “significant” posts on the class’s private social network. I’ll be reposting my articles (with some edits) here on Tumblr for all to see.So I’d like to think I’m relatively up to date with these kind of random, obscure, and awesome entertainment oddities. I’d also like to think that much of the time I’m slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to finding news like this before the mainstream media catches on. So it was a major surprise this morning when I was watching Fox 2 News and discovered that beloved game show star Bob Barker was guest host on WWE Raw on Monday night. The even more surprising thing mentioned was that his guest appearance was announced on Twitter.
Wait, what? Announced on Twitter? Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not at all a huge Twitter user. If you were to view my Twitter updates, they would all be forwards from my Tumblr posts and my Facebook statuses. But generally random news from Twitter, like the great Gmail outage last week, will bleed over into Tumblr and Facebook from other users. That’s fine. But Bob Barker on WWE? I’m very surprised no one in my social circles, online and real-life, caught this one.
But a few weeks ago, one of my staple podcasts This Week In Tech (TWiT) covered a similar story. That week the panel talked about how this Yahoo page, titled OMG!, receives millions of pageviews a month, and actually twice the hits that TMZ does. The panelists had never heard of the site before, and neither have I. The reason being that Yahoo OMG! isn’t targeted towards users like myself and the panelists of TWiT. I suppose the same thing goes for Bob Barker appearing on WWE. I don’t see much overlap between technical internet users and WWE fans.
It’s what I call the “publification” of the web, the movement of internet content away from the technical users who built the internet, and more towards what mainstream media is like today, with entertainment sites and more “general” media. For better or for worse; I could go without celebrity gossip on my internet.
