My house caught fire a few weeks ago,,don’t worry, no one was hurt. I was happy to be alive and managed to keep most all of my stuff undamaged so I concerned myself with the process of moving on and finding a new place.

Meanwhile, the impromptu journalism of my dear roommate Gwen has been spreading like wildfire(pun intended) online. Our Story just got picked up by Wired Online.

That’s me getting reprimanded by the fire chief for my “heroics” in trying to put the fire out.

Here is the picture that drove the whole thing, the cult of mac hates to see one of our beloved fall to the fates:

The Attention Economy implications of this phenomenon are impressive. Suddenly, because of a striking image captured on a whim, thousands of people are now quasi-relating to our experience in the house fire. Unrelated blogs are contributing to and capitalizing on the collective attention being driven around this image and we find ourselves in the midst of a new media hurricane that we know will blow over as fast as it came on.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that such an image would generate a buzz, but if you would’ve asked me beforehand, I could have never predicted this exact chain of events. This is a great lesson in the nuclear fission the new media process really is, now where did I put those control rods…