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.

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.

I doubt many of the people who have been involved in rickrolling others are big Rick Astley fans — and I would even go as far as to say that they probably think the phenomenon has grown to be as popular as it has due to the inherent ‘lameness’ of the song itself.

Now I’m not suggesting that Rick Astley and Sony Music are behind some Machiavellian scheme to revive “Never Gonna Give You Up”, despite the obvious brilliance of such a scheme if they were behind it. However, Astley is certainly going to benefit from this.

Chances are, something like this will happen: news outlets, friends and co-workers will mention something about rickrolling. The rickroll-uninitiated will say: ‘rickwhat’? They’ll go watch the video. Most people will chuckle, roll their eyes or reach desperately to turn the volume down.

But, scary as it sounds, there are people who like Rick Astley’s music. They’ll read about the upcoming greatest hits album, and want to buy it. And some people may buy it just because they can’t get enough of rickrolling.

It’s not the type of exposure that’s going to make Rick money, but the volume. It’s not that most people have now been convinced that Rick’s a really talented guy who should have remained in the spotlight — in fact, it would seem to be quite the opposite message.

And if you’re one of the special few who love Rick Astley, I apologize. No, really.

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.

Anyway, enough digression. I’ve come to think of the knol as the monetized meme — where Google (and possibly the author, to a lesser extent) can make a few bucks from delivering user-created content.

If you think about it, search engines themselves are really the ultimate monetized meme machine: you don’t have to create any content, but instead create the framework through which people access content, display some ads, and hopefully make a tidy profit.

Google tremendous success, of course, has always been spurned by the fact that they’ve been able to tie it all together — the content, the framework (a clean, easy-to-use search engine) and the ads (contextual, relatively unobtrusive text ads, where banner ads were usually the norm).

Of course Google’s launching knols to make money. Think about it — you have an article on mountain biking in New Mexico, and a bunch of contextual ads for New Mexico mountain bike shops. It’s fundamentally no different from how AdSense currently works.

And of course the key is still that users are generating the content and putting up these ads, for which Google charges a portion of the ad revenue that’s brought in.

With knols, however, users are not only creating content for Google — they’re creating targetable, niche content that is perfect for AdSense. Not to mention that users’ desire for recognition will be the ultimate driver for content creation, since you’ll get to see your name attached to that great article you wrote on how to foil bear attacks. Maybe Google won’t have to pay out AdSense earnings for knols after all.

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.

While news about knowledge management has remained roughly the same, searches for the phrase “knowledge management” have dropped off dramatically since 2004. The real question is: why?

To hypothesize a bit, let’s look compare two other examples we’ve already looked at (“leeroy jenkins” and “series of tubes“) in order to make a comparison.

The first and most obvious thing to notice is that all three memes show a gradual decline (with “series of tubes” being the least gradual of the three). This shows us that all three of these memes have become less popular (if we directly attribute popularity to the volume of searches for a particular phrase).

But also notice that “leeroy jenkins” doesn’t even show up in the Google news sources. This of course doesn’t mean that the meme wasn’t wildly popular, which we can clearly see from the number of searches for the phrase (in fact, we can clearly see that “leeroy jenkins” was much more popular, and still is, than “series of tubes”).

This of course, makes sense. The quote “a series of tubes” was from an Alaskan politician, which would have made it into more mainstream news sources (which would be indexed by Google as news sources for Google Trends), whereas our good friend Leeroy Jenkins was merely a World of Warcraft character (who would have a hard time getting quoted in a major newspaper I would imagine).

But if we look at what this means for knowledge management, the trend would look ostensibly grim. It would appear that less and less people care about what knowledge management is, and are therefore not bothering to search for the phrase. This looks like bad news.

The alternative explanation however, is that most people already know what knowledge management is — and that that explains the drop off in searches. What do you think?

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.

In this explanation, Dawkins has subjugated the words “idea” and “theory” under the word meme, making ‘meme’ a broader term that encompasses both concepts. Similarly, songs, fashions and traditions are all manifestations of units of information in a society.

While it’s hard to argue with the guy who invented the word, it would seem to me that the meme itself is not really a unit of transmission so much as a unit of information that propagates through transmission. So within the context of this site, I’ve thought of memes as pieces of information that are transmitted from one person to another (which could potentially be all information, I suppose).

There are certainly issues with use of the word meme — yet meme is certainly shorter than “unit of information”. While we often use the term to describe what could really be called trends, I would suggest that we could look at any piece of information as a meme. It’s just that not all memes are transmission-worthy.

The Journal of Memetics suggests that the examination of meme transmission “can be approached from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, economics, psychology, linguistics, biology, anthropology, complex systems, and computer science” (I might also add knowledge management to that list). So in essence, memetics is not so much a field of study as an aggregation of various disciplines’ knowledge of information transmission and knowledge sharing.

Just thought I’d clear up my use of the word meme.

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.

Relatives: The masked King’s closest advertising relative seems to be Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, who takes online commands and allows us “have chicken our way” (the site also features a chicken mask that you can cut out). In case you’re curious, a list of the commands you can have the Subservient Chicken perform is available on Wikipedia.

Purpose in life: According to Crispin Porter + Bugowsky, the Burger King is supposed to remind 18-35 year old males of a “cool uncle—the uncle who tells you how things really are, and lets you get away with a little bit more than your mom and dad do.” It’s unclear what the King is letting slide exactly.

Special appearances: The King has more recently appeared in Burger King’s newest viral marketing campaign, Whopper Freakout (they stopped selling the Whopper, Burger King’s best selling menu item, for a day at one Burger King location, and filmed people’s reactions). Here’s the video:

Psychological profile: While McDonald’s has tried to present its menu as healthier to consumers (I used the word present rather than make, since many of McDonald’s “healthier” items contain as much fat as their burgers and fries — such as their Asian Salad with Crispy Chicken, which has the same fat content as a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese), the King tries to be a hipper interpretation of the dorky corporate mascot.

The spread of this meme is directly attributable to Burger King’s ability to tie the more subtle, tongue-in-cheek humour in its ads to the inside-joke mentality that pervades web memes, leading those on the inside of the joke to form a sort of tribe or community. This very insubstantial community collectively selects memes in an almost subconscious manner — but as we’ve seen in the case of the King, is not above the power of corporate suggestion.

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.

But this service is now going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I’m not finished. I want people to understand my position, I’m not going to take a lot of time.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

Definitely not the best explanation I’ve ever heard of how the internet works (although he is certainly right about one thing, the internet is not, in fact, a truck).

Now, I’m not going to restate that Bush or Stevens doesn’t understand the internet — I think that position has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet what these two phrases have in common is their same ability to serve as an indicator of one’s knowledge of a particular area, much like “Leeroy Jenkins” in my post yesterday.

What occurred to me since writing that post however, was that a particular group develops somewhat of a back catalogue of memes — and the web, being both a breeding ground and a fluid record of all types of memes, has brought us a greater awareness of these memes.

When I took a look at Wikiepdia’s list of internet memes, I was surprised how few of these I was actually familiar with (especially for someone who spends too much time online). This also demonstrates that much like the real world, online space is not a wide-open field that we all explore regularly.

Just like the physical world, we tend to stick to the same areas, visit the same places (work, school, the grocery store, the bank, whatever) and do the same things. We venture out only when we have a concrete but unusual need like finding a jewelery shop or a furniture store (or are just really bored, in which case we might end up reading all kinds of weird articles on Wikipedia).

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.

In case you don’t know who Leeroy Jenkins is, you can watch the video below (it does contain a bit of foul language — you were warned):

So here’s the basic story behind this, as described by Wikipedia: “Leeroy Jenkins, sometimes mis-spelled Leroy Jenkins and often elongated with numerous additional letters, is an Internet phenomenon named for a character created by player Ben Schultz in Blizzard Entertainment’s popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The character has become popular thanks to a machinima video of the game that circulated around the Internet. The phenomenon has since spread beyond the boundaries of the gaming community into other online and mainstream media.” To make a long story short, some people thought creating a moronic character named Leeroy Jenkins, and have him get all his buddies killed in World of Warcraft would be funny.

In case you have doubts about how popular this meme actually became, here’s a reference to it on the popular trivia gameshow Jeopardy!:

So why do these types of memes catch on? What makes them popular? I would argue that there is one overwhelmingly powerful force that drives memes such as Leeroy Jenkins to grow: tribalization.

Finding something funny is a really weird thing (especially when it’s kind of an inside joke like Leeroy Jenkins) — it puts you in a group that is ‘in the know’ about a particular phenomenon. But it’s not enough to just know about it, you also need to have enough backstory to understand why it’s funny.

In this case, if you’ve never seen or heard of World of Warcraft before, then the Leeroy Jenkins video may just elicit a slight chuckle. Having a frame for the meme is what makes it so powerful however — if you know that World of Warcraft is notoriously addictive, and that players are renowned for their meticulous planning (and not in a good way), then the parodic nature of the video becomes apparent. Leeroy Jenkins, like other memes, shows us that the frame for the meme is just as important as the meme itself.

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.

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.

So without belabouring my love of memes any further, here’s the list (to which I’ve added the top two blogs).

JibberJobber Blog
The Digerati Life
Dosh Dosh
Daily Blog Tips
Forged Euphoria
Above Popular
Deepak
Gangster Sonny
Connected Internet
Blog-Op
Mike’s Money Making Mission
Time to Budget
Can I Make Big Money Online
Blogtrepreneur
Flee the Cube
Blogging Secret
Blogging to Fame
Million Dollar Experiment heads Down Under
Quest to make money on the internet
Kumiko’s Cash Quest
Calico Monkey
Internet Bazaar
Shotgun Marketing Blog
BrandSizzle
bizsolutionsplus
Customers Rock!
Being Peter Kim
Pow! Right Between The Eyes!
Billions With Zero Knowledge
Working at Home on the Internet
MapleLeaf 2.0
Two Hat Marketing
darrenbarefoot.com
The Emerging Brand
The Branding Blog
CrapHammer
Drew’s Marketing Minute
Golden Practices
Viaspire
Tell Ten Friends
Flooring the Consumer
Kinetic Ideas
Unconventional Thinking
Buzzoodle
NewsPaperGrl
The Copywriting Maven
Hee-Haw Marketing
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn
Multi-Cult Classics
Logic + Emotion
Branding & Marketing
Popcorn n Roses
On Influence & Automation
Bullshitobserver
Servant of Chaos
converstations
eSoup
Presentation Zen
Dmitry Linkov
aialone
John Wagner
Nick Rice
CKs Blog
Design Sojourn
Frozen Puck
The Sartorialist
Small Surfaces
Africa Unchained
Perspective
gDiapers
Marketing Nirvana
Bob Sutton
¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!
Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together
Community Guy
Social Media on the fly