Garling Gauge

Obama, Bicycles & Fortune Cookie Politics

‘Your new bicycle’ is the newest trend to mimic

• Barack Obama
• Michelle Obama
• Hillary Clinton
• Ron Paul
• Steve Jobs
• John McCain
• is your new bicycle
• More

Now there are even pillows!

From Eric Zorn’s article, ‘My New Bicycle’ is the new black:

The site opened just last week and the domain name is registered to Mathew Honan, 35, San Francisco-based contributing editor to Wired magazine. He explained how it came about in response to a query I sent via e-mail:

I came up with the idea for the site last week, on [Wednesday, Feb.]13, while riding the bus up Market Street on my way home for the day. My wife is an avid cyclist, and loves to talk about bikes and cycling. Recently, she’s gotten really active in the Obama campaign, and I had been kidding her that “Barack Obama is your new bicycle.” There seem to be a lot of people who feel that way.

I told one of my friends about it, and it made him laugh too. And then the idea just sort of fell into place. I got home, registered the domain, and had everything up just as it is now four hours or so after I thought of the idea. Needless to say, I’m pretty surprised at how it took off.

I thought it was something my wife and friends would get a kick out of, but I had no clue it would be all over the blogs and news sites. There are even sites in Italy, the Netherlands, and France linking to it.

It’s really mind-blowing.

There are about 60 phrases in all. (I forget the exact number.) I wrote all of them myself. I’m not adding or removing anything. Several people have suggested I add more, or that I fix the script so it’s not truly random (so that you get all the phrases one after the other with no repeats). But as I said, I was really surprised by how it took off and can’t put my finger on exactly why it did, I’m just leaving it as it is. It sort of feels like a fluke, and I’m just going to let it stand as a moment in time. You can’t force a meme.

There’s a php script with a bunch of phrases. The index page just calls a new one up at random every time someone loads (or reloads) the page. The linked text just points right back at the main page, so when you click on it, you’re really just refreshing.

In the first seven days, 140,000 people visited, with 2.3 million page views (keep in mind it’s a single page site so that’s a *LOT* of refreshing) The site has been up for a week exactly as of last night at 9 pm pacific time.

I was definitely influenced for the idea of how it would work from Andre Torrez’ site, as well as Sometimes Red Sometimes Blue.

While I’m an Obama supporter, that wasn’t my intention with the site. I never meant for it to be either supportive, or critical, of his campaign. It was just a toy that commented on the Obama fervor, at least in my mind.

It’s been really interesting to me to see people take it both ways–both as a site talking about what a cool guy Obama is, and as a site that makes fun of Obama supporters who view him as their buddy.

I didn’t really intend for it to express either of those perspectives, but I guess people’s own perceptions color their view of it.

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