As pointed out by Boing Boing, what we have is a status update the nephew of Boing Boing contributor David Pescovitz received from Indiana University, the college he’ll be attending in the fall. The message, while mentioning roommate information, served a much different purpose of letting incoming students know no one really wants to see their embarrassing Facebook pictures, so be sure and get that squared away before you start accepting all those upcoming friend requests.

There’s even a screenshot of the update in question:

Basically, IU is suggesting you behave in the following manner:

The 9-year old, Jack Meyer, has been a fan of the Heat since he was a toddler, and the news segment goes out of its way to illustrate the youngster was not mocking the Heat. To illustrate this point, they film his bedroom, which is decked out in Miami Heat paraphernalia. Check it out for yourselves:

When it comes to winning a championship in professional sports, the mentality of “we’ll be satisfied if we play as hard as we can” goes out the window because these teams (and players) care about one thing, and that’s winning. Playing hard and giving maximum effort, especially in the NBA Playoffs, is a given, which explains why traditional sayings like “good effort” ring hollow when you lose. Sayings like that, no matter how well intentioned they are delivered, don’t mean much when the loss means your team is facing elimination the next time they play.

As for the kid raining down “good effort” cheers on his favorite team, it’s hard to fault him. He’s simply repeating the behavior that has undoubtedly been drilled into his head by little league coaches: respect your opponents and always be a good sport, even when you lose. Too bad that mentality doesn’t really apply when grown men playing professional sports take the field. Perhaps the lone exception to this is hockey, which follows the “line up and shake hands” tradition after every game, even the deciding game of the Stanley Cup Finals.

Not only did the kid’s chant stand out, as you can probably guess by the fact someone captured the moment on YouTube, the saying quickly became an Internet meme that blew up on Twitter. For example:

Williams’ tweet features a link that goes to this incredible picture of the meme in action:

These guys would agree:

It’s true, it’s true:

And because of that, things were good.

The original image, which leads, was posted on College GameDay’s Facebook page, and was pointed out to the world by TheBigLead, among others. Once it was given the extra push by EveryDayShouldBeSaturday’s excelsior Spencer Hall, the memes hit at a fast and furious rate. And again, things were good.

An example of this goodness comes in the form of Nyan Corso:

Scroll to the bottom for a full video of Tupac’s appearance on Star Wars.

Luke Skywalker (discovering R2D2 video): “What is this?”
Tupac: “You know what the f*** this is!”

Interestingly enough, Tupac isn’t technically a hologram. The image was created using a technique called “Pepper’s Ghost.” Chemist John Pepper used it in theater in the 19th century.

The Ridiculously Photogenic Guy exploded on the internet after being posted on Reddit on April 3rd. in just a few days the photo got over 40,000 up votes. King’s friend coined the name after observing how, well, ridiculously photogenic he is.

After King posted on Flickr, he had reportedly received 300,000 views within an hour.

The day after the Flickr and Reddit post, the man was identified as New York public relations professional Zeddie Little by the Charleston City Paper.

This morning Little and King were interviewed on Good Morning America, bringing his fame to a more mainstream audience. Ridiculously Photogenic Guy revealed that the photo was taken right after he waved to a friend watching from the sideline. That is why he has such a huge grin in the picture.

Zeddie Watkins Little will be running in the New York City marathon to beifit the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health.

“I really dont know, but I kinda feel honored to be part of a joke that’s in good spirit because sometimes the Internet can be a little vicious or jokes can get bent the wrong way. But these are all kinda, for the most part, positive. It’s funny that everybody is kinda taking like to it. It’s, I guess, the most flattering way to get spread across the internet,” Watkins said in the interview.

Watkins, as he likes to be called, has been featured on a plethora of internet memes in the style of the worlds most interesting man and Phillip J Fry.

Though Watkins is now swooned over by women the world over, he has stated that he is in a committed relationship of five years.

Men and women, alike, are taken aback by his countenance, posting ridiculously flattering comments on Twitter.

In honor of the most non-annoying YouTube meme, perhaps ever, here’s the 100-hour version of the Pop Tart Cat song that helped hack a thousand websites, or, well, one anyway:

If, after a day or two, you can actually tear yourself away from that–kids, this is a great “one more video, mom” video–here’s a video of the “Nyan Cat’s First Birthday Party! [OFFICIAL]” which apparently means this is the official party video, meaning, any other videos of the party are not? Who knows in this day and age…

Make the #HAPPYBIRTHDAYNYANCAT hashtag trend, people.

This awesome infographic from Silicon Angle shows the how far we have come from the first programming language to where we are now.

Before we ever reached the intellectual machines beating men at Jeopardy, programming had simple roots. It began in 1954 with Fortran, a programming language created by IBM that was used for computational mathematics.

Things got even more awesome with the creation of BASIC in 1964 and SQL in 1975. I personally owe a lot to C++ which emerged in 1983. If not for that particular programming language, games on the Nintendo Entertainment System might not have been as awesome.

1995 saw the rise of Java and Javascript which are used to this day from open source applications to custom versions of it powering your smartphones.

What is going to come next? Nobody knows, but I’m sure we’ll one day invent programming that allows machines to write programming for us. The dawn of robot supremacy will be caused by our awesome programming skills.

What do you think the next big break in programming will be? Let us know in the comments.

Via: ServicesANGLE

It now appears that Rick Astley has some competition for his meme crown as the NickRoll is here, and it’s awful.

Nickelback’s latest travesty song, When We Stand Together, is being passed around the Internet, but not necessarily because people like it. Just like the the RickRoll, people are being directed to the video under the assumption that it’s something that they’d actually like to watch. Sadly they’re greeted with the Chad Kroeger repetitiously screeching the word ‘Yeah‘.

If you’d like to punish yourself, check out the video below.

“When We Stand Together” just went up YouTube on November 23, 2011, and it already has over 39 million views. To be fair, tons of people like terrible music, so all those views shouldn’t be attributed to NickRolling.

Let this be a warning to everyone out there: the NickRoll is alive, and it will strike when you least suspect it… just listen to these poor Twitter users:

Have you been NickRoll’D yet? Tell us in the comments section below.

This very topic was discussed by Robert Knorpp at the BlogWorld expo, and thanks to his presentation, we learn one of the biggest keys has to do with inspiring others to react. To drive this point home, Knorpp used to examples: Rebecca Black and the Volkswagen/Darth Vader Super Bowl commercial. Both pieces of content inspired a great deal of reaction, granted, not all of it was positive, but the reaction was the key to these videos living a long life, at least in relation to an Internet lifespan.

From Knorpp’s perspective, the fact that both of these pieces inspired others to react was the key to their extended shelf life. Granted, a great deal of the reaction to Rebecca Black’s content was of the mocking variety, but the fact remains, such reactions are what directly led to her popularity.

It’s almost like the Marilyn Manson approach to publicity, that is, no pub is bad pub.

Of course, if the reaction concerns a product you are trying to sell, you don’t want the reaction to be in the vein of “this is the worst thing ever,” which comprised a great deal what Black’s videos had to face. With that in mind, the reaction of the Darth Vader/Volkswagen commercial is what web marketers should be shooting for, but then again, not everyone can get George Lucas’ approval to use his stuff in their commercials.

To Knorpp, the key isn’t necessarily good content, but content that inspires others to react in a creative manner. The key is balance. Don’t just make a Rebecca Black style of video to promote a widget being sold, because if people actively hate the item, it’s doubtful they’ll be spending much money on it. That being said, good content is a great starting point, just be aware of the reaction it will inspire.

Of course, because of the nature of viral popularity, the content creators have little to no control over the reaction they’ll be greeted with, so be aware of trends, both negative and positive, but at the same time, don’t just copy other people’s work. Create your own piece that’s worthy of becoming viral, or as Knorpp says, keep your audience in perspective when creating this type of content.

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