My intern project was on the Colbert Report!

If you're bored and into Marine Science, here you go.

Background: I've been interning with UCSC researchers that tag and track northern elephant seals at Año Nuevo since the beginning of the quarter. You can check their work out at www.topp.org. Part of the internship is outreach, and this year we named seals after both Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart: Stelephant Colbert and Jon Sealwart, respectively.

The grad student in charge of this had written an intro for Stelephant and intended to put it up on Stelephant's Facebook (search Stelephant Colbert and be his friend, Jon's too.) However, since I've always been a huge dork about marine bio, and have always wanted to try my hand at comedy writing (working for the Daily Show/Report has been a little side-dream for me), I asked to review her biography. As I began editing it, I took it over and completely rewrote it from a Colbert-esque point of view. It was a success, and the Facebook page got pretty popular, with 300 friends in a few days. You can read Stelephant's bio here: http://topp.org/blog/stelephant_colbert_baaaaaaack , and Jon's here: http://topp.org/blog/smelly_show_jon_sealwart .

After a while, the Santa Cruz Sentinel picked up on the story (article: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_11597937 ). I thank Santa Cruz for not having anything else newsworthy, because it hit the front page. People here love their marine bio, and the story got very popular. Over the next 4 days we added over 400 friends to Stelephant's Facebook, and it became apparent that people from all over California, Nevada and even New York had seen the story. As it turns out, the Associated Press had picked the story up and did what it does. We had national exposure for the story in under 3 weeks.

Then, we got a lucky break. TOPP had been working extensively behind the scenes with Google Ocean to get marine science into the new addition to Google Earth. When Google went public with the release, NBC had done a story about this amazing software. Our very own Samantha Simmons from UCSC had a 20 second bit in there, and it got a bit more exposure for TOPP. The video can be found here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#28984490 .

One of the guys who worked for NBC had connections with the Colbert Report. He kindly said that he would talk to his friends about getting Colbert to put Stelephant on the show. 2 days later, we got a call saying that they loved our stuff, and that we would be on the show that night. This was this past Thursday, the 5th of February. Sure enough, 11:30 rolls around and the first two minutes of the show are Stelephant, UCSC and marine science themed! I was so excited, because it was amazing to see Colbert's show do the same kind of dorky jokes I had tried to come up with and see that on TV. You can watch the clip here:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/217977/february-05-2009/stelephant-colbert-the-elephant-seal

Finally, the Sentinel followed up on the story, and I got my 15 words of fame. I'm Patrick Webster. Article here: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_11644240

So there we have it! My intern project was on the Report!