Oscar Peterson was a friendly acquaintance of mine (and even more of Bev Wellman's), and we are mourning his death and celebrating his life. In addition to playing every Oscar disk we have, s seems to becoming my custom, one aspect of this is editing Oscar's Wikipedia site. Which has seen a feeding frenzy in the past few days. I just did a count of the number of edits on the site (you can do this too by going to "Oscar Peterson" and clicking on History. All dates/times Greenwich Mean Time (which is official Wikipedia time coding) December 19 -- 2 edits before death (and no public announcement of illness). routine edit. There had been about 4 routine edits per month throughout 2007. December 23 -- 1 edit. Died that day, but not public announced. Edit has no hint of death. December 24 -- 42 edits. Death announced in the morning news. I heard it at 1200 EST. First edit of the day, by someone else was at 1722 GMT (1222 EST) containing the news of Oscar's death, altho inaccurately saying it was Dec 24. December 25 -- 40 edits. Further refinements. Quotes, Canadian content added. December 26 -- 33 edits December 27 -- 17 edits December 28 -- 10 edits So Oscar's page is settling down. RIP. I've copied Danyel Fisher on this, because when he was a student working with me at Berkeley, he had a neat little research note on "the rise and fall of Melessa" (a badly spelled early virus, when such were big news) which similarly tracked the very quick peaking and tailing off of an event. Another variation on Andy Warhol's "5 minutes of fame". While Oscar had his justifiable jazz fame since the early 1950s, his WikiFame basically lasted 3+ days in December 2007. Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________ S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Room 418 Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-7162 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php Elvis wouldn't be singing "Return to Sender" these days _______________________________________________________________________