Zeddie Little: The real reason you shouldn't run on Sunday.

If you have been spending your days reading only the A section of The New York Times lately, we can forgive you for thinking that this weekend's NYC marathon might be canceled over something as mercurial as a hurricane. After all, that's what Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said today: That holding a major event in a city while its still reeling from a crisis is potentially not the best idea. (Although hey, it certainly would be the fastest way to get over any of New York's bridges.)

And that makes sense, at least on the surface. But dig a little deeper ... say, to Thursday Styles, and you'll find out the real reason people don't want to spend Sunday running around a ghost town. They're afraid someone will take a stupid picture of them.


"Marathon Photos Often Fail to Capture the Glory" reads the led of this poorly-timed faux-trend piece in yesterday's New York Times, which claimed that photo agencies like Brightroom were responsible for all the terrible things that could possibly happen whilst one was participating in a run.

"Sadly — horribly — the list of ways these photos can and almost always do go wrong is wide and deep: Muffin top. Earthquake quads. Wind in the shorts, making it look as if you’re wearing your derrière backward. Front wedgies. Let’s not even get started on facial expressions."

Elizabeth Weil ominously adds that there are 110 official photographers expected at Sunday's marathon before interviewing a bunch of people who benefit from your neurotic fear of looking silly during a race: the CEO of female athletic wear Oiselle; the host of a new Travel Channel show with the tagline "Americans will do just about anything to entertain themselves"; the journalist's husband; an exec from Brightroom; a photographer, and a woman who has authored both Run Like a Mother and Train Like a Mother.

And while the pieces does quickly nod to the Hurricane Sandy debate twice, there's a much higher word count placed on Ridiculously Photogenic Guy Zeddie Little, whose inadvertent ascendance to handsome man meme-hood is actually to blame for people not wanting to run a marathon.

The idea that a site can wildly succeed as a meme factory, a listicle aggregator, and as of recently, a serious news operation rubs some folks the wrong way.  The most recent source of attack was the web presence of McSweeney's, the San Francisco-based publishing house (and internet humor destination widely known for—but of course—their lists).

McSweeney's recently published a list by one Jory John entitled "Suggested Buzzfeed Articles." Among the titles were "15 Ways to Obliterate a Tree" and "3 Opera Singers Covered in Day-Old Newspapers," both of which made this braindead, heat-stroked writer chuckle (as a McSweeney's list will sometimes do), the joke being: Here is the extreme version lampooning the extent to which Buzzfeed will go to make a list for their website, for which sometimes they can be found reaching.

So Buzzfeed answered them, by actually creating the articles Mr. Jory jokingly suggested, explaining:

McSweeneys was kind enough to suggest some articles for us and here, we make those suggestions a reality! If you've got a suggestion for an article we should do, send it to suggestedarticles@buzzfeed.com, and we'll do our best to make it happen!

The "suggestions" they chose were:

• 11 Political Lessons We Learned From "Gilmore Girls"
• 29 Reasons to Hate Your Life
• Elvis Presley's 42 Sweatiest Moments
• 3 Raccoons That Will Kill You And Your Family
• 50 Photos of Bill Clinton's Forehead
• 18 Things To Scream At A Cow
• 10 Peaches That Resemble Pat Sajak
• 4 Inspiring Lance Bass Quotations
• The World's 13 Laziest Salmon
• 25 Numbers Bigger Than 2
• 16 Beautiful Photos From Underneath A Bed
• 8 Surprising Uses For An Orange
• 10 Grizzly Bears Doffing Newsboy Caps

Yes. They actually made all of those.

For the lists that seem unlikely to be even remotely possible—like the Pat Sajak one, for example—they simply photoshopped the meme into reality. Others, like the 50 Pictures of Bill Clinton's forehead, they aggregated into reality. It is as funny, canny, and absolutely as frightening a response they could muster. For all the wiseass moxie employed in making this a reality—which they appeared to start working on yesterday—there is an utterly odd and somewhat disconcerting boast at the heart of this: That anything can be turned into a meme or a list, no matter how absurd, uninteresting, or fictitious. Challenge this, and you're daring them to excavate heretofore unmolested depths of Internet Ephemera, and bring them to the surface of the collective consciousness in response. Let this be a lesson to us all.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek 

Sorkin's hatred of bloggers, blogs, websites, forums, and pretty much anything printed on any material other than paper that isn't a manifesto devoted to his radiant brilliance has manifested in both his work and interviews plenty of times before.

But this particular exchange—with The Globe and Mail's Sarah Nicole Prickett—was an astounding display of glib, misogynistic, and slightly sociopathic jackassery, especially on behalf of a guy who could probably use the benefit of the doubt as far as People Who Write On The Internet go. Given that, you know, his last television project failed, and also, given that they keep uncovering the various ways he's recycled his own material over the years (from teleplays to commencement speeches), he could probably afford himself the benefit of the doubt.

And yet, this happened:

"Listen here, Internet girl," he says, getting up. "It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while." I’m not sure how he’s forgotten that I am writing for a newspaper; looking over the publicist’s shoulder, I see that every reporter is from a print publication (do not see: Drew Magary). I remind him. I say also, factually, "I have a New York Times subscription and an HBO subscription. Any other advice?" He looks surprised, then high-fives me. Being not a person who high-fives or generally makes physical contact with interview subjects, I look more surprised.

"I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five," he says. He makes me try to do it "properly," six times. He also makes me laugh; I’m nervous, and it’s so absurd. He loves it. He says, "Let me manhandle you." Then he ambles off, hoping I’ll write something nice, as though he has never known how the news works, how many stories can be true.

Inevitably, The Internet which he so loathes has natrually taken this moment and run with it. Meet Aaron Sorkin's least favorite Tumblr, Hey Internet Girl.

For example:

And:

As well as:

And so on. (Naturally, the entire site has already been copied onto a Buzzfeed post we won't link to, but if whole-hog copy-and-paste from them doesn't certify a meme on some level, what does?)

Aaron Sorkin may finally now realize that you reap what you sow, especially in the Age of Viral Content. Or he's just going to let this aggression build up and release it in the form of more long-winded speeches by The Most Heroic Fictional News Anchor Ever, Will McAvoy, or even worse, deify the blogger-hating Steve Jobs in his screenplay about the Apple founder's life.

We'd put the safe money on the latter of the two options.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Jonah Peretti.

A tipster points us the way of hasbuzzfeedhiredanyonenewtoday.tumblr.com, a single-serving site tracking Buzzfeed hires on a daily basis. And guess what you'll find if you click today? The words "YEP, IT'S A GIRL" with a link to Hillary Reinsberg's Twitter feed, wherein the Abrams Media employee who writes for pun-and-wordplay-connoisseur website The Jane Dough announces her hiring at Buzzfeed.

This is very useful for, like, twenty (ish) media reporters and those Buzzfeed employees who want to better know the people they're going be sharing their increasingly small workspaces with. Still: Servicey!

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

OMG, MEME!

Scene: Lincoln Center, Mercedes-Benz Lounge after Mara Hoffman's Saturday show.

Fashion Blogger One: Have you seen that "Shit Fashion Girls Say" video??

Fashion Blogger Two: So funny!

FB One and Two: (in unison) "Oh my god, I love truffle fries!"

FB One: Wait, have you seen "Shit Gay Guys Say to Their Cats?"

FB One: Probably, right?

FB Two: Yeah...I love memes.

So maybe Muppets are not protesting Wall Street, or Sesame Street, but the #OccupySesameStreet meta-meme—an absurdists' take with little to say on the state of the actual protest, and yet, a stunningly funny one—was taken to a new level this morning by some very creative photoshoppers at Tauntr, a website we've never actually heard of but are now amused by no less. Like this one:

Surely this meme has room to go before being exhausted (seeing as how this reporter has personally witnessed a brief yet substantial Muppet occupation of Williamsburg, perhaps, even possible). B for Bulls On Parade? Andrew Ross Sorkin walking down Sesame Street to ensure that it's safe for Lloyd Blankfein, perhaps? Either way, the rest of their photos are Tauntr's site. Do enjoy.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

But Buzzfeed is trying to position itself as an aggregator for all the mememakers and memewatchers on the Internet. The company announced a "pop culture search engine" today to that end.

The search engine prioritizes results with the most traffic on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites. Social traffic is an "ungameable" criterion, the company says--a dig at Digg, where power users could for a long time manipulate rankings, and at Google, where an entire field of search engine marketing professionals has arisen to game rankings.

Memes don't always surface in search results, especially when they're fresh. This is especially true for generically-named memes. If you Google "honey badger," trying to find the National Geographic video of the animal dubbed over by a sarcastic narrator, you'll get the original NatGeo video and a Wikipedia entry as the top results. Boring. Search on Buzzfeed to get the meme and its variations.

Buzzfeed's search is "a search engine for what is hot right now." Buzzfeed acts as a platform for brands to launch hopefully-viral campaigns, so controlling a real-time search engine for viral content would hugely benefit its clients. The search engine launched with partner publishers including Huffington Post, Aol, Cracked and CollegeHumor, and plans to add more sources to the results.

Twitter's real-time search and sites like Urlesque have been filling the meme-finding void and Google has been integrating social traffic into its results more and more, so Buzzfeed has some competition in cataloguing memes.

Buzzfeed says 160 million unique visitors come through each month. Quantcast puts the site's readership at about 400,000 unique visitors a month day.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The meme peaked in March, but was revived recently by a post on Tumblr, according to meme-detective Jay Hathaway of Urlesque:

The head-in-a-freezer photo meme was started in April 2009 by David Horvitz, a New York artist known for (among other things) starting a subscription service for his daily photos of the sky. At the time, Horvitz was running a Tumblr where he would post instructions to his audience each day. These were generally off-the-wall things like "record a dramatic reading of a YouTube comment fight" or "ask to watch the sunset from the roof of the tallest building near your house." In November of this year, David had a book of these instructions, Everything That Can Happen in a Day, published by Random House.

Taking a photo with your head in the freezer and tagging it with the seemingly random number "241543903" was one of these instructions. Horvitz told us he got the idea after telling a sick friend, Mylinh Nguyen, to try sticking her head in a freezer.

Now, a search for the number pulls up pages of strangers poking their faces into freezers. Not to cool down, or find the vodka, or clean the freezer burn crust off the bag of really old peas--but for no reason at all.

Check out these people putting their heads in the freezer >>

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

What's the big deal? Well, this is the same guy who won Time Magazine's man of the year in 2009 and turned the rest of the votes into an anagram for a disturbing sexual act. Of course Poole didn't actually win fair and square. 4chan's legion of users scammed Time with an automated voting program. 

But when it comes to 4chan and its enormous influence, breaking the rules is kind of the point.

Born and raised in NYC, Poole founded 4chan at age 15. He wanted to create a space where he and his friends could talk about anime. He found a Japanese site called 2chan that was based primarily around posting images. The site was different from most American boards in two important ways. There were no barriers to entry like registration or user names. And the 4chan had no archive, or as Poole put it, "No memory." It created a space with a unique metabolism, even for the web.

Pretty quickly 4chan became a teeming carnival of internet culture, where only child pornography was off limits. It spawned viral memes like LOLcats and went from 20 of Poole's friends to 12 million unique users a month, mostly men aged 18-34, becoming the second largest message board in the world. 

Just because the community backed Poole once doesn't mean he can command them from on high. "For example, I didn't know about the Time magazine stunt until it was well under way," Poole told Nick Bilton in the NYT. "If I asked the community to do this, they would have done everything in their power to make sure that I was at the bottom of that list - that's just the way they work. I like to leave them to their own devices."

Poole recently decided to try his hand at business, raising capital for a new startup called Canvas. No word yet on what he'll talk about at SXSW, but he's certainly a man who's journeyed close to the dark heart of the web, even if he never mastered it. In a way, that lack of control is what makes Poole so important. As the recent fiasco at Digg has demonstrated, dealing with a community of powerful users can be an online company's greatest challenge.