February 14, 2010
Making fake history

OK, here's the official "Twitter existed in 1910 in Copenhagen" debunking-thread.

This friday, responding to the online chatter about Google Buzz, I made a fake newspaper and fake meme-archaeology story about the reception in Copenhagen of the mixer - the kitchen appliance. It involved the idea that switchboard operators in Copenhagen in 1910 spent idle time operating a Twitter-like service, transcribing telephone conversations which were then circulated to subscribers and printed in newspapers. Pretty silly stuff, I thought.
Enough people picked up on the joke, that a few inbound links started appearing, where the story was being accepted at face value. "That's fun!" I thought, so let's see where this goes. Some people on Twitter, pointed out, however, that it's almost too easy just to make stuff up; it's prudent to make it absolutely clear that this is something I made up in about an hour this week.
So far the story has jumped to Norway, Russia and France in addition to a couple of Danish blogs.
[UPDATE: Making headway on Reddit as well, except you now have to be exceptionally lazy to buy it]

I'll update this thread with interesting occurrences of this entirely made up history of Danish IT-history in the wild.

Posted by Claus at February 14, 2010 05:07 PM | TrackBack (0)
Comments (post your own)

Klasse, Classy. God underholdning. Hvor er din Donate-knap?

Posted by: Angermann on February 16, 2010 7:40 AM

Vil tro den sidder et eller andet sted paa en fredagsbar.

Posted by: Classy on February 16, 2010 9:12 AM
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