Interesting Snippets

The idea of a meme is itself new. Coined in 1976, the word “meme” – something that spreads rapidly through a culture – was restricted to scientific contexts until the mid-1990s, according to the Nexis database. Since then the usage of the word has exploded, more than tripling in the last five years.

Watts cited a science-fiction trilogy by Isaac Asimov, in which Earth is a land of atomized steel caves, as opposed to Solaris, where all communication is virtual. On Earth, everyone whom everyone knows is known intimately, but they do not know anyone else. On Solaris, the connections are vast, but weak. It is almost too convenient to read that passage and, given the state of the news business in 2003, not think of newspapers as the equivalent of all those steel caves… The alternative to the steel caves, to the “clusters,” was the ephemeral network of Solaris. But where, in the here and now, did that network exist? How could it be harnessed? Peretti.. believed he had an answer: He called it the Bored At Work Network… How better to provide a momentary relief from the tedium than to disseminate something so engagingly simple that recipients would take a moment to forward it to friends

That precocious Charlie is more than a finger-biter — he’s a moneymaker. The family that created the most viewed amateur YouTube video ever — featuring a biting baby and his talkative older brother — has made a half-million dollars from ads surrounding that video.

This 1894 film, one of the earliest produced by Thomas Edison’s Black Maria movie studio, features two cats boxing. Obviously it’s not actually a video, but it’s certainly evidence that even at the dawn of cinema, over a century before YouTube, cats ruled the moving image.

A woman who creates stuffed animals based on children’s drawings has defied Internet protocol by doing something really cool, posting it online, and then asking that nobody talk about it.
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“My site has gone viral; people say that I’m on Pinterest; people are blogging about me,” she wrote on the Child’s Own Studio site. “But now I don’t know how long people will have to wait before I get to their order