Banapana » Meme Safari

A Quickie: Idiotarod

Russell Warner — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:27:34 +0000

Hopefully more to come today, since I’ve been away from my blog for a week and a half in Amsterdam, but first just a quick note on a new word that I found and love: Idiotarod. Not exactly sure how I would pronounce this, but clearly some cue should be taken from the original Iditarod—the world’s most famous sled-dog race. Instead, Idiotarod brings to mind the thousands of commuter vehicles, sit idly in their slowly moving lanes every weekday. [Thanks to Vica of La Vida Vica for coining such a great word!]

Memeburst

Russell Warner — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:24:01 +0000

As I mentioned in my recent note on memes, the phenomena make good use of twitter. And with a new tool called Twist you can see mentions of words quantitatively, illustrating trends that are possibly occurring. The obvious one for today has been the mention of “Michael Jackson” or “MJ” which at the peak of the discussion of the news was actually trending at 26% of all messages on twitter.¹ It turns out that the King of Pop reigns supreme even after his demise. However, I spotted a sillier trend in investigating Twist as a tool. Being in possession of the mind I have and maybe because it’s Friday afternoon, I decided to see how the word “penis” fares on Twitter. It turns out that the word is fairly consistently used in roughly .03% of Twitter messages. But then I wondered, why the spike on June 24 at 11:30pm EST? For a brief time, the usage of the word penis spiked to practically double its normal mean at .07% of messages. Why the blip? I looked into some of the messages that were being posted and noticed that it was likely the fault of Jon Stewart. The Daily Show—a satirical show about current events²—airs at 11:00pm EST. During that particular Wednesday episode, discussing events surrounding SC governor Mark Sanford, said “…another conservative politician with a liberal penis.” Voilá! Instant memeburst.

I’m not going to use the word tweets. I already tolerate blogging. One stupid internet noun is enough. ↩
And the bright stuff surrounding you now is called daylight! People who don’t live under rocks get to see this all the time!—when we’re not watching the Daily Show. ↩

Memes Love Twitter

Russell Warner — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:56:17 +0000

While scientists have really yet to hit on a good model for the concept of the meme, it still serves as a great metaphor, the genes unit of culture, spreading through minds at sometimes rapid paces. It seems that all we’ve done with the web and the web and the Internet have given memes even greater opportunity to spread and spread further. In a showing of solidarity with protesters from Iran, twitterers are putting a transparent green overlay on their profile icons.

You can see the virus spreading...

Unlike other memes, which seem to pop into your life or your inbox intermittenly, you can watch this meme spreading in real-time just by watching twitter feeds. I feel like I’m watching people get colds, though. Yuck.

Experiment Complete, Cleaning Up

Russell Warner — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:18:20 +0000

Well, I tried a new experiment with my favorite online tool, twitter. I thought it might be fun to compose them into digests and post them daily here. As far as experiments go, it was quite a successful one since it proved three things to me. One, it’s a stupid idea and made a mess of the blog. Two, one is largely due to the fact that I twitter way more than I blog right now. I’ve discovered a whole great gaggle of pithy writers on favrd.com who are nothing like the ego massaging masses of twitterers who write compelling cliffhangers like “I’ve got a headache” or “I’m going to bed.” Anyway, if you poke around on Favrd for long enough, you’ll find most of them. I enjoy competing for favorite stars. Someday someone will learn how to spam Favrd and that will be a sad day, but I don’t sense this trend coming to an end for at least another 6 months. It reminds me of the early days of the blogosphere, those rough-tough ragged days when you could stake a claim just about anywhere on the world wide web and set yourself up a nice little blog. People argued back then that blogs seemed trivial and useless—little more than diaries made public. Oh, how wrong you were naysayers. And twitter seems to be causing a similar hubabaloo. So, I think there’s good uses for twitter, aside from adding another awkward verb to the English:

I wish I lived in the heyday of ham radio. Because I would call it Hamming. Everyone would be like, “Huh?” And I’d be like, “Just wait.”

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

The second thing that I learned from this experiment was that what I like to write on Twitter has nothing to do with what I like to write on Banapana. Admittedly, I’ve been loosening up on the syntax here on Banapana—makes it easier to write more—but I’m still writing about particular subject matters, not stuff like this:

The evidence is mounting, and scientists agree, global idiocy is an increasing concern–possibly doubling by the year 2010

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

That there’s a legitimate place to put a thought like that on the Internet?—now that’s just fun! So, it looks like Twitter is just entertainment! Who knew that enforcing a 140 character limit would make email fun? So, at any rate, I am for the moment considering posting a twitter digest of my best from the week here, but no more daily updates. It makes a mess.

Attention Internet Peoples

Russell Warner — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:00:58 +0000

I am glad that someone is keeping track and that there are standards and all:

“GREG RUTTER’S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU’RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING”

Яolcats

Russell Warner — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:19:42 +0000

Well, just when you thought the world’s most popular meme just couldn’t get any better, it goes and mutates in order to better reflect the cultures of Eastern Bloc countries. That’s right commrades, be mindful of the Яolcats. It appears that the days of Glasnost for kitties are still ahead for us.

The #JTP Meme

Russell Warner — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:24:32 +0000

I found a new meme on Twitter (the coolest social app there is). With twitter, if you want to refer to a particular subject, you can put a # in front of the key word (the same way you can reply to someone by putting @ in front of their user name). Someone’s started a #JTP subject which stands for “Just the Punchline.” What’s funny (sad?) is that I actually recognize quite a few of them.

Happy Monday

Russell Warner — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:05:14 +0000

Not a lot to post here today since I’m working on a big project to post in the next few days. But, if while you’re waiting you’d like to make your ears bleed, you should check out this awesome mashup of David Lee Roth and the new Microsoft Songsmith!–Everyone’s got a song inside! Really, Microsoft? Just stop it.

I don’t think this little ditty has top=notch meme high-fidelity, but I would put even money on it showing up on ytmnd in a few weeks.

[via Daring Fireball]

When Humor IS the Product Design

Russell Warner — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:00:18 +0000

There are lots of products out there that might accomplish some silly task like “stress relief” but whose real and primary purpose is humor. The Tiddy Bear more than applies here, it’s actually best in show. But I don’t want to ruin the joke for you, so watch the video and then I’ll say my piece.

With people more and more saturated with advertising messages that scream about lifestyle and how to be cool, it’s actually refreshing to run into an ad that looks as though it belongs on Saturday Night Live but that is taking itself completely “seriously.” I think the manufacturers know that they could have just released a square cube with a strap on it and called it Seatbelt Relief, and that the Tiddy Bear was clearly a better strategy. It’s a brilliant strategy, in fact, because in an attention economy, it’s something that will get people talking and in the meantime, they’ll sell a few since it solves an albeit trivial need. It’s still a little frustrating (to me anyway) that we’re still a culture not above manufacturing products that have two and three year lifespans as products and decades long lifespans as garbage, but whatever; I still think we’ll get there. Asking for a totally sustainable product lifecycle for the Tiddy Bear just sounds silly, doesn’t it?

Wordle

Russell Warner — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:31:20 +0000

I think, by now, anyone who’s digerati has seen Wordle. Wired made a big thing of it a few days ago, visualizing several word clouds revolving around the new iphone. I also just saw a great cloud over at The Big Picture constructed from Ben Bernanke’s presentation to Congress—a great use of Wordle. So I’m just throwing my two cents in, too.

Here’s a cloud constructed from all the tags used here at Banapana:

Here’s just a cloud of the front page of Banapana:

At least with the tag cloud, I’m glad to see that media is the largest word, since that’s what this blog purports to be about!