December 2009

  • Internet Meme: Pay It Forward

    By lisala on 12/30/09 7:26pm
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    I like, very much, the concept of "pay it forward."

    It's a bit disconcerting to realize that the concept as currently presented, especially in online culture, is most closely associated a slight novel that's so full of saccarine that my teeth hurt just looking at the cover blurb, and a film that's actually even more annoying. Nonetheless, the concept itself is utterly fabulous. Sometimes called "alternative giving," or even "random acts of kindness,""pay it forward" has deep roots in both legal and American culture.

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  • Internet Meme: Rule 34

    By lisala on 12/28/09 8:43pm
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    Rule 34 states:

    If it exists, there is porn of it.

    It was soon followed by Rule 35:

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  • Google Is Taking Over

    By ecoscott on 12/19/09 1:06pm
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    Google- As Ubiquitous as the Morning CoffeeGoogle- As Ubiquitous as the Morning CoffeeAs if we didn’t know already, Google is taking over. Google's mission? According to them, it’s “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Fair enough- but of course, they are a business as well, and a good one at that. They reported $5.94 billion in revenue for 2009 Q3, up 7% from 2008. So they are doing well. And making investments in everything from YouTube to AOL to ClearWire. Basically, they know what they are doing and are doing it aggressively.

    I’ve noticed 3 things lately that speak to another expansion that Google is going for, I would say in a big way:

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  • Medieval Tech Support

    By lisala on 12/18/09 3:11pm
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    This skit was originally created for the Norwegian Broadcasting company (NRK) in 2001. It was performed on the show Øystein og jeg, starring Øystein Backe (geek) and Rune Gokstad (despondent monastic user), and written by Knut Nærum.

  • Internet Meme: Skitt's Law

    By lisala on 12/10/09 6:08pm
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    In 1992 John Bangsund writing in the Victorian Society of Editors' Newsletter observed that Muphry's Law referred to the well-known editorial phenomenon that:

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  • Internet Meme: Godwin's Law

    By lisala on 12/5/09 9:38pm
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    Back in the day, in 1990, to be specific, before UseNet was transformed into little more than a digital petri dish for porn spammers, Mike Godwin noticed  a disturbing pattern. In UseNet threads about guns and gun control, those who oppose gun control sooner or later reminded those in favor of gun control that Hitler outlawed personal ownership of firearms. In debates about birth control, those who argued in favor of abortion remaining a legal option were inevitably compared to mass-murderers in the context of Nazi death camps. And of course, in any discussion around censorship on the Internet, some sort of reference to Nazi book burning was predestined.

    In response to what he perceived as a method of shutting down open discourse, Godwin devloped Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies (generally referred to in shorthand as Godwin's Law):

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