Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: amc, mad men, mccann erickson, proposal, sterling cooper, tumblr
Today there are many instances where people take things that happen on the Internet, radio or television a little bit too far, and it starts to effect life in “the real world”. I’m told it is this magical place where people interact on a human level, completely devoid of technology. Hmm, if only.
One such example involves something I have already blogged a little bit too much about, Tumblr. I only bring it up again because yesterday, someone proposed, via Tumblr. Yes, PROPOSED. Their proposal was posted in banner form above the Tumblr log-in where every user could see it. I snapped a photo for your viewing pleasure.
There were many, many posts about this on Tumblr after it happened. And just as many people found it adorable as found it atrocious. Propose over the Internet? What kind of memory of the proposal does that leave you with? How will you describe it to your Grandkids? They probably won’t even know what a Tumblr is. And I must say, I agree. While I give this dude points for being creative, it is a little creepy to propose over the Internet.
Secondly, I wanted to discuss an article I found in The New York Times the other day about the advertising company McCann Erickson. This real-life company has been name dropped on the hit AMC show Mad Men and, SPOILER ALERT: in the season finale last week, the fictional advertising company in the show, Sterling Cooper, is revealed to have been bought out by McCann, against the will of Sterling Cooper’s employees. And thus, for this week only, McCann’s website features an intro with the show’s characters talking about the merger and then is concluded with a banner reading “Welcome, Sterling Cooper.” Check it out now, it is only up on the site for a week!
I find this kind of integration of television to a real world company a bit more understandable than the Internet proposal, almost cute and kitschy in a way, as if to say, “Yes, we can have a good time and poke a little fun at ourselves and the TV show we have been mentioned on,” but it still doesn’t completely fit this serious advertiser’s model. What about clients who don’t watch the show and see it? Won’t this just seem a bit out of place? Does this kind of media placement mean we should all be paying a lot more attention to hit TV so we can feel more in the loop, more than we already do, when even advertising company conglomerates are using it regularly? Hmm.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Black Eyed Peas, Fergie, Girl Talk, Mashup, Nirvana, Rick Astley, Rick roll
When it comes to music, we all have those tried-and-true songs we love to listen to as we get ready to go out for the night, or the ones we squeal giddily to when a DJ spins them on. But one of the great things about recent technology is that almost anyone can become a DJ–and a pretty decent one, at that–by being able to create song mash-ups. Now while this post isn’t directly about the Internet, I definitely think song mash-ups are a crazy phenomenon that certainly only spread through viral videos and the Internet, otherwise you would only hear such mixing if you went to see a professional DJ at a bar or club.
I mean, look at Girl Talk. He had a nine-to-five job as an engineer but was able to quit his job in 2007 to become a professional DJ and tour around the world. And he also allowed fans to buy his 2008 album, Feed The Animals, online for any price they were willing to pay, a la Radiohead.
Girl Talk aside (Although you should DEFINITELY check him out if you haven’t heard of him, seriously) I am posting today some common mash-ups of Top 40 songs that we all know, so that you can recognize how badass the mash-up is in action. The first is a combo of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” I felt this one was important to include because “Rick Rolling” is also a viral video that took off a couple years back online, and so I thought this would pay homage to that.
Retro Wal-Mart logo. ROFL.
Well well well. We all complain about WalMart, what it does to America, even what it does in our small town of Athens. In terms of the Internet this is also certainly the case. There are plenty of sites opposing Wal-Mart and its politics and policies, including Wal-Mart Watch which often criticizes how the lower level employees of Wal-Mart are treated, and Michael Moore also criticizes the extremely small amount of health insurance money loyal Wal-Mart employees’ family members receive in the event of their death in his newest film, Capitalism: A Love Story.
But, today let’s look at Wal-Mart on a lighter side, shall we? On the site People of Wal-Mart, pictures are posted of the shoppers of Wal-Mart in (let’s just say it) ugly, ugly clothes. Just started in August of this year, this site just likes to post funny photos of people in Wal-Mart, plain and simple! As the site’s “About” section states, it is all in good, light-hearted fun. Since Wal-Mart is open 24 hours, people come in at all hours and at various states of cleanliness and decency. Perhaps it will make you take an extra second before you go on a Wal-Mart run…they might catch you on camera! Check it out and have a giggle.
any of the other sites that I have spoken of on this blog are about specific niche subjects that do not even have any real content of substance, per say, but just goofy little mini posts, really. That changes this, however, with a hilarious site I have come across, Cracked.com. Cracked doesn’t have just one specific function but posts many different kinds of goofy content, including articles, videos, columns from columnists, Craptions, which are pictures with silly reader-assigned captions tagged onto different pictures and forums for readers to sound off.One article currently on the site’s homepage that I really enjoyed reading was “6 Movie Plots Made Possible By Bafflingly Bad Decisions”. My Dad and I constantly watch movies together and say “That wouldn’t happen!” all the time, so such an article made me chuckle right from the title. My personal favorite is the King Kong one…I mean, it is SO preposterous that a humongous gorilla monster would be brought over on a boat to America by mistake!
In terms of video, I found this one on the site called “8 ‘Adorable’ Videos That Qualify as Animal Cruelty” which sarcastically chronicles how ridiculous it is that people essentially mock and in some cases, nearly harm their pets just for a funny video or joke. It also works in perfectly with the theme of this blog, and while there are a lot of viral animal videos I haven’t really touched on many of them yet, so this is a good time to show some.
Being tech savvy is something we all would ideally like to be and often aspire to work toward (cough cough, me having this homely blog) but some people out there really make it happen. One such person is Alan Schaaf, an Ohio University senior. Pretty much always known as a technologically-apt dude, Alan really kicked things off last year when he created his own photo hosting site, Imgur. But of course, every such project starts with humble beginnings.
“In high school I was involved in this computer club/tech support thing,” Alan told me, as he explained how he first got into technology. “They didn’t actually have a full time tech person to work in all the labs and stuff, and so they got students to do it and so that is where I met a lot of tech friends. One person would make something cool and everyone else would want to beat them…sort of a competition going on there, but no one said anything about it. Once I got better my mom referred me to a couple of her business friends and I would create websites for their businesses, but I didn’t really like doing freelance web design because you are working for a client, and my hobby turned into work.”
But Alan continued to freelance until his sophomore year of college when he then focused more time on schoolwork and internet radio station ACRN, aka the All Campus Radio Network, where Alan hosts the radio show Tech Talk. He also recently re-designed the station’s website to include all kinds of multimedia and music content. But those hobbies alone only lasted until junior year, when school itself just got boring.
“The idea [for Imgur] popped into my head last winter quarter,” Alan said. “I was in this class, Anthropology 101, and it was the most boring thing ever. I would sit there and try to think of something to do and I started drawing designs on paper for a new website. And then I would work on it whenever I had a chance; it took me two months to actually get [Imgur] up and running. “
And out of sheer boredom, Imgur was born. Once Alan did get it up and running, he posted it to the user-generated news link site, Reddit. Its own mini online community, Reddit users liked Alan’s site and gave him helpful feedback on it.
“These sites are a big part of things going viral on the Internet,” Alan said. “You post something to a forum, like I posted my website onto Reddit, and everyone really enjoyed it. Once I realized how many people liked it and I realized there is a need for this kind of thing, I really got to work on it.”
That was at the end of last year’s winter quarter, and ever since then Alan dedicates a lot of time and money to Imgur…especially money.
“It originally started that I didn’t want ads, but then the reality set in that it was costing me money every month, so I had to put ads on there,” Alan said. “And since Reddit is more of a community than a place to submit links, people were giving me suggestions on how to do it and I followed what they said, so it is some thing everyone likes…but I was completely surprised at how well it did, just like everything that goes viral on the Internet.”
And Alan definitely realized how viral Imgur had become when the Comedy Central television show Tosh.0 posted an online interview with Alan about Imgur on their site…well, sort of.
“They didn’t even ask me to do that interview, or tell me about it afterward,” Alan revealed to me. “I just googled Imgur one day out of boredom and found it up there. I think Imgur is really transparent in what I do and what all goes into the site is mostly all through Reddit. That’s how the Tosh.0 thing started I guess, and that’s where he got all those quotes from and stuff.”
But aside from Comedy Central, Alan did have some real interviews—job interviews, that is—with Google and Facebook. While both interviews seemed okay, Alan explained that he would really rather just have Imgur be his job after graduation, and considers it a real possibility, considering that Imgur is one of the top 700 websites in the world based on traffic.
“Just based on that traffic rate I know I can make money off of it,” Alan said. “I’m not exactly sure how right now, but I know I can do it. People ask me to join their start-ups all the time, but I just want to work on Imgur, move to California and buy a sailboat. You can totally come party on my sailboat, Kelly.”
Hmm, graduate college and then go party on Alan Schaaf’s sailboat? I may just have to take him up on that.
Alan Schaaf: Mild mannered student by day, Imgur mastermind by night.
Of all of the social networking sites, Tumblr is one of the newest and most visually appealing, emphasizing image over text. Similar to the News Feed and live updates posted on Facebook, Tumblr has a “Dashboard” which blogrolls up-to-the-minute content from everyone that a specific user is subscribed to. Considering my last post was about all of the different viral and social networking sites, the thing I would like to point out that is especially handy and above par for Tumblr is that within Tumblr a person can subscribe to the Tumblrs of such viral sites, thus getting their content without even leaving Tumblr. This is an excellent marketing and branding tool on Tumblr’s part. For example, there is a Tumblr specifically for TXTSFRMLSTNGHT, FML and many others. There are also certain Tumblrs that have gained notoriety through Tumblr themselves, even if they do have an outside site. One such example is Wordboner, a site that creates witty sayings and graphics that can be ordered on posters and t-shirts. But without these sayings getting a presence in the Tumblr blogroll for those that follow them, it is pretty safe to say that they would have a lot less web traffic.
And so it is with this that I encourage all of you to get a Tumblr, if not for the constant narcissistic updates you can post about yourself, your daily life and your friends, but so that you can read the constant updates, funny pictures and latest Internet memes of others! And once you get started, start to follow me! My Tumblr is here.
Let me know what you think, I certainly enjoy (perhaps overindulge would be a better word) in the Tumblr world myself.
Considering that the Internet is accessible anywhere in the world where you can find a connection and a server, people often seem to forget that each piece of information actually does come from a specific location somewhere in the world. Sometimes these locations are important, and sometimes they aren’t, but either way it is something to keep in the back of your mind.
4CHAN, the largest English-based imageboard site for example, was started in NYC in 2003 by a fifteen year old kid (yes, only fifteen!) who posts as “moot”. Buying the server space on his mom’s credit card (with her permission) the kid started the site as a place to discuss Japanese video games and television shows, but now becomes a server of all kinds of funny images and Internet phenomena/trends.
YouTube was created by three former PayPal employees out of San Bruno, CA in 2005. These three guys, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim started the site when they were disgruntled about how it was not easy to share videos with each other from a dinner party they attended and thus, YouTube was born. With the guys originally holding up YouTube’s office above a pizzeria in San Bruno, CA, the company was moved to San Bruno when it was bought by Google in 2006.
College Humor is a website that posts comedic pictures, links and videos, that, as the name states, are geared towards the college age demographic. The site was started by Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen in 1999, two friends in high school in Baltimore, as I have indicated on my map. Site traffic is around seven million visitors per month, a rather high number for a comedy site.
Facebook is the global social networking site that hosts thousands of people’s individual pages, allowing them to post information and pictures about themselves as well as comment on the profiles of others, post links to outside sources and post status updates. Started by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room in 2003, the company has since taken off to become a global brand.
Flickr is an image hosting site supported by Yahoo!, often used as a host for bloggers’ photos such as this one! Since 2009 it claims to host over four billion images. Other such sites include Photobucket and Picasa.
FML, or F*** My Life, is a blog that serves as a “recollection of everyday anecdotes likely to happen to anyone.” Posts on the site are sent in by individuals about bad things that happen to them on a daily basis and read like a blogroll for other’s enjoyment. Originally started in France by designer Maxime Valette in 2008 with the french version Vie De Merde, which means “life of shit”, it became so popular an English version was created and a book of the best FML anecdotes was published in 2009.
PostSecret is an ongoing community mail project started by Frank Warren in 2005, where people send anonymous secrets to Frank on postcards and he posts them to the site, a Blogger hosted blog. Frank posts a new set of secrets each Sunday in addition to releasing books of said secrets and lecturing at various colleges and lecture halls.
Stuff White People Like is a WordPress-hosted blog of various people, places and things that “white people” like. Started by Christian Lander in 2008 and even has a book release, this blog uses comedy and irony to mock white people and their “uppity” tastes. As a white person myself, I can say that it definitely hits close to home.
Tumblr began in 2007 as an alternative blogging site, where users create a Tumblelog, a short form blog. Each person’s posts that a user subscribes to come up in their “dashboard” so readers can view recent posts without going to individual blogs. Heavy on visual images and videos over wordy posts, Tumblr is thus more easy to use and more visually appealing than other blog forms.
MySpace is one of the original social networking sites, started by President Tom Anderson as an offshoot of Friendster in 2002. Now in competition with Facebook and Tumblr, MySpace was one of the first sites that allowed users to personalize their pages, post bulletins, blog updates and pictures, and comment on other users sites.
Posted here is a map of all of the locations where these sites started; as you can see they are all across the country, even across the world; and this is only ten sites! Enjoy.
NOTE: Three of these sites are located in NYC, so you have to zoom in reeeeeal close to see all three pins.
This post is dedicated to failing, or as many of us say today, EPIC FAIL. Now of course what first comes to mind when you bring together failing and ze Internet is FAIL blog.FAIL blog is a hilariously funny blog which posts pictures of people, places and things that are just…failing. I’ve inserted a slideshow here of a few I liked so you can see what I mean, as there really is no way to describe it, you just have to see them for yourself. FAIL blog is just once again a case of the Internet mocking real life and how truly goofy humans are.
My second act of FAIL today is an article I found about the creator of the Fail Whale. In case you don’t know what that is, Fail Whale is the whale picture that comes up when you can’t get something to work on Twitter, as seen below.
People all over have fallen in love with the Fail Whale image, in fact there is even now a Fail Whale martini! As the article states, Yiyung Lu, the Fail Whale creator, originally created the image as a birthday e-card for her friends and did not even have a Twitter when the company first came across the image and asked her if they could use it for their site. She later went on to create the Foul Owl image for Twitter, also seen here, which comes up when a suspicious account is suspended.
Read the article if you would like to learn more, and happy failing!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dickipedia, etsy, parody, regretsy, wikipedia
As we have already seen in my previous posts, many Internet phenomenon result from cultural moments or funny screw-ups happening out there in real life or in other entertainment mediums (TV, movies, etc.) but this post points out some parodies of existing websites that have no inherently entertaining quality until parodied.
My first example of this is Dickipedia: A Wiki of Dicks. No worries, this is not some kind of gross porn site, they mean “dick” in the personality kind of way. Formatted just like one big Wikipedia page, Dickipedia categorizes pages of people/places/things whom they deem “dickish” into different categories: Political dicks, Entertainment dicks, Media dicks, International dicks, Sports dicks, Business dicks and Miscellaneous dicks, with the very last listing being, Your Mom.
Dickipedia does not allow editing of the information provided about the people listed as regular Wikipedia does, but be on the lookout: the creators of the site have posted on it that they may change this option if editors “promise to be good”.
My second and equally hilarious website parody is called Regretsy, a parody on the art website Etsy, where people buy and sell handmade goods. On Regretsy, however, they post photos, descriptions and prices people were asking for for the most ridiculous and ugly pieces of crap they have made. The website then posts their own opinions of the item below the photo, and chuckling ensues.
Check it out, I guarantee you will laugh or your money back (which I can’t say the same if you bought one of the ludicrous items on Regretsy)
-Kelly
