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Internet
November 14, 2008
Basement Bloggers
As Gelf has recently documented, Sarah Palin is the latest in a long list of well-known people to dismiss bloggers as basement-dwelling malcontents. She told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, "I'm going to characterize them as those bloggers in their parents' basement just talking garbage" (is it necessary to include [sic] when the speaker is Sarah Palin, or, is it just implied by this point?). Not surprisingly, the bloggers struck back.
Internet
October 10, 2008
2001: A Search Odyssey
To celebrate the by-now-probably-evil company's tenth anniversary, Google has recreated its search engine from January 2001. For those of you who have forgotten the halcyon days of the pre-9/11 world, the Dow was still above 10,000, "social networking" had little to do with the internet, and George W. Bush wanted to pursue a "humble" foreign policy. Though we're hardly the first to try it, Gelf decided to look up some current search terms in Google's wayback machine.
Internet
August 28, 2008
Stryde Hax Beats the Times
Blogger Stryde Hax has exposed an age scandal involving the Chinese Olympic women's (or should it be girl's?) gymnastics team by cleverly hacking into search engines like Google and Baidu. It sounds like a neat little triumph for citizen journalism, and it kind of is—Hax managed to uncover the gymnasts' real ages—or at least the ages the government had previously assigned them—using tools available to anyone with a brain and an internet connection. But his work wasn't exactly original.
Internet
August 12, 2008
The Full 'Monty'
The Montauk Monster, that bloated, seemingly decomposing corpse of some creature that washed up on a Montauk, Long Island, beach last month, has been getting a lot of attention recently—perhaps too much attention when there are decidedly more important things going on, like simultaneous wars and the return of $2 Starbucks after 2 p.m. So why is a certain part of the online world abuzz about "Monty"? It's the pageviews, stupid.
Full article » | by Max Lakin
Internet
August 1, 2008
Hasbro's Triple Turd Score
Imagine you're a major board game manufacturer, specifically marketing an old tried-and-true word game. Competing with video games and all sorts of other attention-hogging entertainment products can't be good for business. It looks like you're looking at a future of grandmas, word nerds, and collecting dust in the basement. But then, by some chance miracle, two software engineers in India decide to adapt your game to a popular social networking site, and it takes off like wildfire.
Internet
July 10, 2008
A Word of Mouse Virus
Marketing something over the internet, are you? (We are, kind of, we suppose. Say, buy a T-shirt.) Good news, then—you're participating in a new trend! No, really, you are, even though we're pretty sure the internet was used for marketing from the moment Al Gore invented it. But now, of course, it's different, because everything is 2.0 (we're currently taking bets on when the web goes 3.0), so you're using word of mouse.
Internet
June 9, 2008
Celebrity Baby Blog 1, Economist 0
Last week, People.com acquired Celebrity Baby Blog, an internet hub for the all-important topic of famous people's children. As TechCrunch pointed out, the deal makes sense seeing as People "knows that stories about pregnant celebrities and their babies sell." Actually, they sell quite a lot—Celebrity Baby Blog registered nearly seven million page views in April alone, according to comScore.
Internet
May 8, 2008
Angry Man Smash Computer
Gelf knew we had come across internet video gold when a friend first forwarded the YouTube video "man freaks out in coffee shop"—a clip of a man breaking down and attacking his computer. The breakdown may or may not have been faked (we grew skeptical when he claimed to have his half-written novel on his laptop). But the reason we knew this was going to be a hit is because it lies at the intersection of two strangely popular YouTube genres: man-on-machine violence and guy freaks out in public.
Internet
April 23, 2008
Understanding Facebook's Lexicon
The introduction of Facebook's Lexicon is a valuable research tool for studying the curious habits of Facebook users. Marketing executives are already salivating over the goldmine of data that Lexicon will sift from the wall posts of the ever-coveted hardcore Facebooking demographic. Eh, who are we kidding? Lexicon is nothing but a fun time-wasting tool that reveals neat bits of information about the Facebook set. Mostly, it just confirms things we already knew—is anyone shocked by the direct correlation between "party" appearing on Saturday night and "hangover" on Sunday morning?—but the fun is in seeing this information presented graphically like some important earnings report. Below, Gelf highlights some of our favorite bits from Lexicon before we tire of our new toy.
Internet
March 11, 2008
Client9.com
When the explosive story about his involvement in a prostitution ring first appeared on the New York Times website on Monday, Eliot Spitzer was identified only by the title of "Client 9." Nick Galbreath, a New York-based programmer, wasn't sure that the implicated bigwig was the governor, but, he tells Gelf, " 'Client 9' sounds cool, the story is huge, so as a goof I paid $10.13 to buy [the domain] a few minutes later."
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