Just a quick post to let you know of a fun new feature I’ve added on my photo blog. It’s basically a little box in the sidebar that lets you view random images from my posts, and a click will take you to that particular post.

While the photos are currently showing up a little weird, due to the fact that they’re two different sizes, I’m hoping to fix that so that they all show up properly in the sidebar thumbnail preview. Also, if you refresh the page, you’ll see a new batch of photos every time.

Also, if you’re looking for more cool images to look at (or interesting stuff to read), check out my friend Greg MacGregor’s site at rewinder.ca — where you can also spend some time admiring his simple, lots-of-whitespace design.

UPDATE: The weird sizing that was happening with the image previews should now be fixed. I have yet to do any testing in Internet Explorer, but things are looking better in Firefox anyway.

In case you haven’t heard, ‘rickrolling’ is everywhere. What’s rickrolling? Well, in a nutshell, it’s when you provide a link that is supposed to be to one thing, and actually links to a video of the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Wikipedia has more on this (yes, it’s really a link to Wikipedia, I won’t rickroll you).

Rickrolling has also been used as a form of protest, with the Church of Scientology being a particular target for anti-Scientologists. I’m a little confused as to what Rick Astley has to do with Scientology, but I digress.

Now different people certainly will have different opinions about rickrolling. Some may think it’s stupid and pointless, others may think it’s funny and entertaining. But guess who’s probably happier than anyone about rickrolling? That’s right, Rick Astley.

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Google announced back in December that the company would be creating something called “knols”, which Google describes as “units of knowledge” — which has been met with a mixed reaction. For example (and this is lifted, by me, from the Wikipedia page on knols), Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, suggested: “At the end of the day, there’s a fundamental conflict between the business Google is in and its social goals. What you’re seeing here, slowly, is Google embracing an advertising-driven model, in which money will have a greater impact on what people have ready access to.”

Google embracing an advertising-driven model? Given the whole AdSense thing, isn’t Google already advertising-driven? Not to mention the fact that the Google motto is “don’t be evil”, not “be good” (tricky footwork there, Google).

While it would be pretty cool if there was a non-profit organization that created a bunch of neat stuff like Google does, I just don’t see it happening.

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In case anybody reading this blog doesn’t already know, I work in knowledge management. As a discipline, it hasn’t really been around that long — Wikipedia suggests it’s been an established discipline since 1995.

So let’s assume for a moment that knowledge management itself is a meme — one that really started to pick up around 1995. Well, the web certainly wasn’t as popular in 1995 as it is now, so it’s a bit difficult to determine the popularity of the phrase then, but take a look at the graph below from Google Trends.

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In response to my post about the Burger King meme, Stephanie suggested that perhaps the Burger King king wasn’t really a meme at all. In that particular case, she asked: what’s the difference between a meme and a simple marketing gimmick?

Here is the definition of a meme according to Richard Dawkins (author of both The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, along with many other books), the guy who actually coined the term (as paraphrased by the Journal of Memetics):

The word “meme” refers to “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”. More precisely, a meme can be defined as an information pattern, held in an individual’s memory or in an outside artefact (e.g. book, record or tool), which is likely to be communicated or copied to another individual’s memory. Examples of memes are ideas, technologies, theories, songs, fashions, and traditions. This covers all forms of beliefs, values and behaviors that are normally taken over from others rather than discovered independently.

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Birth and early life: Born sometime in 1955. The King could often be found making balloon animals and doing magic tricks inside (or sometimes in the parking lot of) your local Burger King. The King was also clean-shaven in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, having not yet grown his now-legendary beard.

Rebirth: Was reborn sometime in 2003 when Crispin Porter + Bugowsky, an advertising agency whose clients include not only Burger King, but also Coca-Cola, Volkswagen, Domino’s and Virgin Atlantic Airways, came up with the King when they found an oversized Burger King mask for sale on eBay.

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I pretty much just summed up two of my favourite all-time web memes — and both can be credited to American politicians who were probably not the most technologically savvy guys (if there’s an understatement award, I just won it).

The history of the word “internets” is pretty short, having been coined by George Bush on October 17th, 2000 in the third Gore-Bush presidential debate (interestingly, note that the word “interweb” — another term that poked fun at the technologically not-so-adept — had already been around for a few years).

The “series of tubes” meme has been around even less time. Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens used his “series of tubes” analogy to explain his position on net neutrality. Senator Stevens’ explanation was mocked shortly thereafter on a Wired blog. Here’s what Ted Stevens actually said:

There’s one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

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The ability of a meme to grow and transform, seemingly on its own, is quite amazing. Yet memes don’t actually transform on their own — they are in fact transformed by people. Take Leeroy Jenkins for example.

Either you know who Leeroy Jenkins is or you don’t (don’t feel bad if you don’t, I had no idea what this referred to until very, very recently, thus I have apparently been living under a rock for the past few years). But I’ll get to that in a minute.

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I’ve been tagged.

All Tips and Tricks has tagged me to respond to the ‘5 reasons why I write’ meme. As I said before, memes are an interesting way to get people to share knowledge.

Instead of me just listing why I write, I’d like to list 5 principles for why knowledge sharing matters (and makes me feel the need to keep writing here).

1. Sharing knowledge is important.

Fundamentally, getting the right information at the right time is what we’re all struggling with. Anyone in today’s economy would be hard-pressed to say that knowledge sharing doesn’t impact their job or, in a broader sense, their life.Â

2. Knowledge sharing can be done by anyone.

Everyone knows something that is valuable to someone else. Sharing your knowledge with someone else is a personally rewarding experience that (to me, anyway) outweighs monetary benefits.

3. Sharing knowledge through technology should be easier.

While technology has become increasingly prevalent and important in all of our lives, it also adds an increasing layer of complexity.

Some of our most widespread technologies have changed our lives dramatically by facilitating and changing the way and speed with which we communicate with each other.

We need to better understand how exchanging knowledge about technology and exchanging knowledge through technology depend on one another.

4. I like to write (especially informally).

While I spend most of any given day reading or writing, I don’t often get a chance to write informally to a wide(r) audience.

The growth in popularity of this blog has really surprised me (now up to around 70 feed subscribers), and has encouraged me to keep writing. Thanks to all who keep reading.

5. More people need to share what they know for free.

As I’ve said before on this site, sharing knowledge for free seems counterintuitive, but is often the best option.

The commodification of what we do as knowledge creators and sharers can potentially have detrimental effects that we haven’t even considered. Making knowledge freely available benefits us all as a species.

I’d like to tag North x East (one of my new favourite blogs) and The Digerati Life (one of my old favourite blogs) to let us know 5 reasons they write.

I always enjoy anything that has to do with memes (in case you’re not familiar with memes, here’s a definition). I also happen to enjoy things that turn the conventional way of looking at things around.

In this case, it’s Technorati.

Quick Online Tips has a post about the so-called ‘Z List’, which was created in response to the heavy-hitting blogs that grace Technorati’s ‘A List’ (according to Quick Online Tips, Mack Collier started the ‘Z List’ meme).

A meme’s simplicity is what usually makes it popular, and this meme is certainly simple — if you have a blog, you can participate in it too.

If you want to participate in this collaborative exchange of what blogs you think are great, you just have to follow these rules:

1.  
   1. Create a new post on your blog.
   2. Copy and paste the entire list of blog links below.
   3. Add any blogs that you want to include near the top of the list (optional).
   4. Link back to the blog where you first got the list from.
   5. Do not include your own blog links on the list in your post.
   6. Make sure that all links point to each blog’s homepage.
   7. Publish the post.

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