Internet Famous Class

In 2007 and 2008 I taught the Internet Famous Class at Parsons School of Design with Evan Roth and James Powderly.

It was dedicated to learning “the art and science of getting hits” - how to spread your work to the widest possible audience online. The key insight: quality and visibility are completely different things.

The twist: it was the first algorithmically-graded class in the history of academics. We built custom software called “Famotron” that measured the online attention economy - view counts, blog links, social media activity, followers and their influence - and used it to award students their final letter grade. Students could check their grade at any time with a Google search.

15 students per semester. No essays. No exams. Just traffic.

What we did

Class exercises included creating “concept Twitters” in the style of @NatHistoryWhale and @MarsPhoenix, then racing to see who could add the most followers in an hour. (Neil Patrick Harris won.)

We also did field trips - like helping distribute the infamous fake New York Times announcing the end of the Iraq War.

Press

• TIME: “Googling for Your Grade” (December 2007)
• Wired: “‘A’ Is for ‘Eyeballs’ in Internet Famous Class” (February 2009)
• Newsweek: “Learning How to Get ‘Internet Famous’” (August 2009)
• FAT Lab announcement
• AdWeek: “Internet Famous Class Gets an A+”
• HuffPost: “College Class Teaches You How to Get Famous on the Internet”
• Wayback Machine archive of internetfamo.us/class

NBC coverage (2008)

NBC New York, 2008.

Current TV.

See also: Know Your Meme, FAT Lab