A Tale Of A Thumb

On Saturday evening, my friends and I returned from a day in Torun, a small town roughly halfway between Poznan and Gdansk, after attending a charity game between the Ireland fans group You Boys In Green (YBIG) and a local selection. Poland were playing the Czech Republic for a place in the knockout stages of the tournament, and, with the fanzone full to capacity, we headed to the main square to watch the game on one of the screens erected by its bars and restaurants. On the way there, one of the many volunteers for the city handed me a flier for a goodbye appreciation from the volunteers in the square on the following Monday afternoon. I took a quick snap of the flier in my left hand with only the edge of my thumb visible and tweeted the pic, using the free city wifi - https://twitter.com/tetsujin1979/status/214109757739503616/photo/1. Initially I didn't think anything more of it, it was one of many images I'd posted from Poland and another of the thousands of tweets I'd posted since joining the microblogging site After the game ended, and a downpour had convinced many of the fans to head home rather than risk being soaked, I checked twitter again and was surprised to see the image had been picked up by the sports and humour blog balls.ie - http://www.balls.ie/2012/06/16/crazy-poznan-is-throwing-a-goodbye-party-for-the-irish-fans/ - and had been retweeted several times The next morning I was surprised to see that Paddy Power had mentioned it on their twitter feed - https://twitter.com/paddypower/status/214281980760702976 - and credited me as the author of the pic. What followed on Monday caught me completely off guard, while browsing the Irish Independent's website, I noticed a headline for a goodbye party for the Irish fans in Poznan. Thinking this would be about the party itself, I opened the page only to have my photo staring back at me - http://www.independent.ie/sport/soccer/euro-2012/irish-news/so-lonely-round-the-streets-of-poznan-polish-city-throws-a-goodbye-party-for-irish-fans-3140886.html Finally, after the Ireland - Italy game I received a tweet from a former co-worker that my photo had appeared on Craig Doyle Live! The episode is still available on the RTE player - http://www.rte.ie/player/#!v=3321453 - at 7:30, I took a quick snapshot and you can see it here: Finally, using a site I built myself some time ago, I built a graph to show how my tweet progressed though the twittersphere - http://retweetgraph.appspot.com/Gallery?id=237001 - it received little traction until the RTESoccer account retweeted it and then it really took off, finishing up with 55 retweets, a personal best!