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Posts Tagged ‘youtube’

“Meme” is the least understood word on the Internet

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Today’s unusual disappearance of the original “RickRoll” video file uploaded to YouTube (which has amassed over 30 million views and was forever prominently featured on Rick Astley’s YouTube channel), has led popular übergeek Chris Pirillo to declare the Internet meme of RickRolling “dead” (update: ok, it looks like he understands the word ‘meme’ a bit more than I gave him credit for).

As much as I admire Chris, I’m not so sure he loads of other people don’t understand the meaning of the word “meme“. A meme is an idea spread from person to person, not a single item or piece of so-called intellectual property. Physical artifacts, or, in this case, Internet content items, can be used to spread ideas, but the ideas themselves exist only in the minds of those people exposed to them. Simply removing one digital iteration, one copy, of a content item used to proliferate an idea does not effectively kill said idea, no matter how popular the content item might have been. (Besides, the RickRoll video itself is so widespread that boundless digital copies and variations exist in numerous forms.) Rickrolling is an idea, not intellectual property, and it therefore can never be subject to copyright, and it can never “die”.

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Tags: Barbara Streisand Effect, Chris Pirillo, copyright, meme, memes, music video, Rick Astley, RickRoll, video, youtube
Posted in memes | View Comments

How I Internet

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

I am a prolific social media user. As a man who engages in the space for business and for pleasure, I thought I might share how I do my internetting, aka, how I propagate and build my personal brand across multiple platforms.

Now, as some of you, especially ping.fm users, are reading this, you might ask yourselves, “why doesn’t he just use one service to populate everything?” Well, the answer is simple: each service has different needs. They all have different audiences, and they (typically) each separately require unique approaches and handling.

Those few personal brands who work in the social space who have large, entrenched followings can afford to “broadcast” to otherwise “narrowcast”outlets (by that I mean they can send one identical content item/link/status to many different services, allowing their following to engage with what’s shared in the space of their choosing). But I think this is a less effective approach, and can be overly redundant. On the other hand, it does reach users in their preferred realm(s).

Well, I’m no Pirillo or Scoble as yet… but, as I said, while I’m trying to present a uniform message, or personal brand, I realize that each venue, each niche, needs to be handled in its own unique way – personalizing the personal brand, if you will. A web juggernaut like Pirillo might not need to do that, but as I am building my brand (something I can do for any brand, hint hint), I know I need that more niche-tailored approach.

So, here’s how it goes for me..

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Tags: Digg, facebook, fark, flickr, Foursquare, Internet, LinkedIn, myspace, social media, social networks, social sharing, social Web, twitter, Wordpress, youtube
Posted in social media | View Comments

About Chris Anderson’s “Free”, Malcolm Gladwell’s review, and why I think Mark Cuban is mostly right

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has recently released a free book, suitably entitled Free. Drew Keller, our “Web Strategies for Storytelling” instructor this summer in the MCDM, pointed us students to several responses to the release, including those by Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker, marketing guru Seth Godin (in response to Gladwell’s generally dismissive review), and Dallas Mavericks owner/attention whore Mark Cuban. Forgive me for sounding overly casual or trite in my response to the discussion, but I think at this point a dead horse is being beat to an outright pulp. The overwhelming message of the digital age is that free is what the people want, free is what the people are finding ways to get, and new business models are in high demand to figure out how to cash in on free (as impossible as it sounds). Of course, everyone is trying to figure out what those models are. (…and we of the MCDM know the answers always begin with the word ‘social’…)

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Tags: chris anderson, drew keller, free content, malcolm gladwell, mark cuban, monetization, seth godin, youtube
Posted in advertising, monetization, social media | View Comments

this encounter is a lie

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

My next video for my storytelling course:

Tags: entertainment, storytelling, video, web video, youtube
Posted in entertainment, storytelling | View Comments

YouTube Audio Preview: is web communication actual “writing” or something else entirely?

Friday, October 10th, 2008

It’s generally held that teh intarweb pretty much separates itself from other media in that it’s a two-way street. I publish information in some corner of the web, you publish (as in, comment, vote, react, share, etc.) right back. Sure, “long ago” we had ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the paper, but now communication with those who publish information of any kind is taking place in a way planet Earth has pretty much never seen before.

So, the big questions that I am sure are being researched in the halls of academia today, especially in the field of linquistics, are probably these: How is the internet altering language? How is the internet creating new words and new meanings, or even new languages, such as “AOL speak” (think the letters L-O-L, as in laugh out loud) or “1337 speak” (that’s the word “leet” – for example the 3′s are backwards E’s – as in, “elite internet user speak”, something only other nerds are supposed to understand)? Are typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors merely another way people are accepting written communication as the next evolution of the English language? Is all this hurting or helping the English language? And so on and so forth.