The most important element is having a large percentage of users who consider your product a “must have” (over 40% is a good benchmark). This gives you two key benefits:
The first is that your churn will be relatively low (if it’s a “must have” why would users leave?), so you won’t be wasting resources filling a leaky bucket. The second is that “must have” products generally maintain strong word of mouth.
Cops looking for lady robber who knocked off shoe store in cat mask
New York City gets its own leprechaun.
Know Your Meme: YouTube Trollbait
Internet Science Patrick explains the subtle nuances between unintentional troll-baiting, and trolls who troll trolls. Watch the video. You’ll get it.
Welcome to the Institue, Patrick!
via knowyourmeme
Douglas Hofstadter - Person Paper on Purity in Language
Hofstader’s classic satire on sexism in language.
Although there is a report that LeBron James will not be making recruiting visits, the Knicks still want someone to visit Madison Square Garden on the eve of free agency. The Garden is looking for three hardcore Knicks fans to spend one night at The Garden leading up to the premiere of MSG Network’s “Knicks Night Live” on June 30 at midnight, the start of the NBA’s free agency period. Contest winners will arrive on June 29 at 7 p.m. and spend the next 30 hours at the Garden. The Knicks will provide meals, behind-the-scenes access and the chance to sleep at the World Most Famous Arena.
I’m filling out the form as soon as I’m done posting this.
In this twisted, bizarre and broken culture of Stern’s NBA, the Chicago Bulls and Miami Heat overshadowed the draft with what passes as accomplishment now: Gutting good players off rosters, clearing cap space and praying World Wide Wes is lying to everyone else, not you. […] Now the arms race for basketball’s biggest soap star has transformed into the most fascinating free-for-all this sport’s ever witnessed. Tampering is out of control, side deals promised everywhere, and James and his inner circle have the NBA where they’ve always wanted it: on its knees, bowing down to the King.
For fun, Mr. Kimmel picked up an Apple MacBook, opened the Photo Booth program, and began walking through his offices and interviewing his staffers on its Webcam. “I was like, maybe we can do this if we’re not able to get on the air,” he said.
Jay Dedman: are you reading this? Our future is finally here. And it looks a lot like Jimmy Frikkin Kimmel.
I contributed a couple of titles to Roy Christopher’s Summer Reading List for 2010. I’ve excerpted them below:
Kenyatta Cheese
I have but two books that I’m reading this summer.
The first one is a collection of essays called Deleuze and New Technology edited by David Savat and Mark Poster (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). While Gilles Deleuze didn’t live long enough to see the particular web of digital and biotech that we live among today, his theory and writing clearly anticipates it. Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) concept of the rhizome as an organizational theory has a surface analogue in our Internet, and the Society of Control can be seen as Web 2.0 with a dark cape. Deleuze was critical of the “machines” that he thought about but he never bothered thinking of them as evil. He seemed to be much more interested in the forms that emerged out of our machine-assisted living. These essays are an attempt to extrapolate what some of those thoughts might have been. While Poster is the headliner in this collection, I’m looking forward to the essays by William Bogard, Verena Conley, and Eugene Thacker, whom I consider fantastic theorists in their own right.
The other book that I’m reading is Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball (Ballantine/ESPN Books, 2009), 700-page sandbag of a book that includes his history of the National Basketball Association, his take on race in the league, and an endless supply of digg-bait style listicles of the Best Players, Best Teams, and other barely quantifiable attributes. I love basketball but I cringe when reading Simmons’ column for ESPN. His pop culture references read like SportsCenter channeled through an episode of Family Guy. His tangents are legendary for their pointlessness. A friend described this book to me as an overlong blog post written by a juvenile frat boy who watches too much porn. I expect that I’ll enjoy this book immensely.
We spend a lot of time at KYM trying to triangulate the origin of images and catchphrases. I say ‘triangulate’ because we put an emphasis on finding multiple sources that can corroborate a single idea (and not several sources repeating the same story.)
One of the big dangers of relying on a single unearthed Wikipedia edit or a lone Geocities page is that you end up taking old information as fact just because it is the earliest you can find.
Look at the story of how the recently deceased 7’7” basketball player and philanthropist Manute Bol was wrongly credited with coining the phrase ‘my bad’:
“Language experts” haven’t actually given Bol sole credit for “my bad,” but a Language Log post in 2005 by Geoffrey Pullum did float the idea that he was the originator. Pullum relied in part on a couple of newspaper quotes I had uncovered from early 1989, when Bol was playing with the Golden State Warriors, tying him to the phrase:
Washington Post, Jan. 8, 1989
The best thing about him is he keeps the Warriors loose. When he throws a bad pass, he’ll say, “My bad” instead of “My fault,” and now all the other players say the same thing.
The Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg adds a May 15, 1989 quote from The Sporting News (“Bol says ‘my bad’ when he means ‘my fault’), and Google Books turns up another 1989 source, Martin Manley’s Baskeball Heaven: “When Manute makes a mistake, his Sudanese dialect leads him to say, ‘my bad,’ and he does have to say it occasionally.”
Though Manley presents “my bad” as simply an error brought on by Bol’s lack of proficiency in English, other sources say that he picked it up from his fellow basketball players after coming to the United States. Take this explanation from Leigh Montville’s 1993 biography Manute: “He didn’t know English, but he sure liked to talk. He quickly used all the phrases of the practice game, saying, ‘Let’s get busy,’ or ‘I’m kicking it,’ or ‘My bad.’”
Given all the evidence, Montville’s suggestion that Bol merely spread the phrase instead of inventing it is a lot more credible.
Every day we receive about a dozen emails from people claiming to have inside knowledge of the source of a meme. One of the things that Chris and I are working through is a set of criteria for evaluating these claims, and if an origin cannot be determined, how to best present the evidence of conflicting claims.
I think we have a lot to learn from etymology.
via knowyourmeme
