Joshua Topolsky and Paul Ford discussed the piece here: https://soundcloud.com/tomorrowpodcast/episode-10-paul-ford-...

One part of the podcast that stuck with me was the idea of an article as an event. It really was quite a while ago people talked about a text as an event. I mean, like a new book or something.

I guess Buzzfeed (and the like, which is everyone nowadays) is sort of trying to pay for their real journalism with "aww"-clicks and "omg!"-clicks, it wouldn't surprise me if cool articles like this became more of a commonplace thing.