Diary – 13 October 2007

An internet executive taking to the streets of London without a BlackBerry is about as rare a sight as the Circle Line working normally. But sometimes you have to let go of the familiar to discover important home truths. So it was that at the end of the week the entire staff of Bebo’s headquarters in London was ordered to down tools, put on T-shirts emblazoned with the company logo and embark on a scavenger hunt across the capital. Away from the business of writing code and building a social network, we actually managed to bump into our social network in person. It’s an extraordinary feeling to be mobbed by members of your audience who, spotting the T-shirts, wanted to share animatedly their life experiences with you as well as joining in the chorus of ‘YMCA’ with the team in the middle of Trafalgar Square. Being high-fived by schoolchildren and declared cool by ordinarily sullen teenagers shows just what an important part of their lives social networks like ours have become. It was the nearest we will ever come to being celebrities. I only wished my eight-year-old son had been along to see my moment of fame.

The devotion of the audience to sites like Bebo has been described as being akin to a cult. Except in our case, the cult is actually a plotline in our phenomenally successful online drama, KateModern, a story of London early twentysomethings on the run from mysterious men in cloaks. Here is a programme with an audience that cable and satellite broadcasters would be proud of. It may not rank highly among the viewing choices of dedicated Spectator readers, but among your teenagers it is a very different matter. In the first eight weeks, the series had an astonishing 13.3 million episode views, mainly in the UK, with each episode typically out-rating the top shows on Sky One and BBC3.