It's nice to know you have readers. Or listeners. Many (many) years ago, I was a DJ at WPRB, 103.3 FM in Princeton, NJ, the Princeton University student-run station. It's a commercial station with a prime commercial frequency (this is what happens when you get into the FM market at what was effectively a pre-boom time). Occasionally, we'd run contests for things like T-shirts or tickets to local concerts. Forget the 103rd caller or, at times, even the 3rd caller. We'd make hopeful pleas -- "Be the 7th caller now to WPRB" -- and the cardinality of results was always the same, at least when I was on the air early Sunday mornings -- first caller was immediately promoted through the ranks to the desired ordinal. So seeing real results (check out the new blogs.sun.com hosting software, that reports true daily traffic) is heart-warming.
Sometimes, however, it's not always a massive audience that's required for a tipping point to be established. Sometimes it's just the right phrase that turns into a meme as espoused by the Richard Dawkins school of verbal networking. Sometimes a phrase is so infectious it spreads as fast as email, voicemail and cell phones can carry it. Like "Freakin A" (here shown in PG-13 form).
Ever wonder what the "A" stands for? As part of a station history, one former WPRB jock provided what is perhaps the [warning: vulgarity contained in this link, if you're offended by what my mother once called "a bad word for a nice thing" don't click] only written history of the phrase, including its etytomological and electromagnetic origins. Something uttered among friends became a friendly utterance - not through a broadcast to thousands but through thousands of serial unicasts. Individual readers, and listeners, count.