We’re On The Map (The Internet Map, That Is)

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 04

The Internet Map (http://internet-map.net/) is a cool new website which maps the top 350,000 sites on the internet by similarity and popularity. According to Gizmodo, “each site is represented by a circle whose size depends on the amount of traffic, and the space between each one is determined by the frequency with which users jump from one to another.”  Furthermore, websites are clustered together according to their content. Quoting Ruslan Enikeev, the site’s developer:

As one might have expected, the largest clusters are formed by national websites, i.e. sites belonging to one country. For the sake of convenience, all websites relative to a certain country carry the same color. For instance, the red zone at the top corresponds to Russian segment of the net, the yellow one on the left stands for the Chinese segment, the purple one on the right is Japanese, the large light-blue central one is the American segment, etc.

Importantly, clusters on the map are semantically charged, i.e. they join websites together according to their content. For example, a vast porno cluster can be seen between Brazil and Japan as well as a host of minor clusters uniting websites of the same field or similar purposes.

Being a typical Generation-Y narcissist, I immediately rushed to check where C-Section Comics is located. Here are some photos (click each photo for a larger image):

C-Section Comics is a relatively small planet, orbiting the gas giant Reddit (that’s the giant light blue planet left of us).

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 01

Zooming out, we could see that we are located in a cluster which (as far as I can tell) contains mainly geeky image based sites. Geekologie and Dorkly are geek blogs (lots of tech and gadget related stuff), while Threadless.com is a “design a T-shirt” site which contains lots of geek designs.

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 2

Zooming out farther, we are now viewing a cluster which mainly consists American image based sites. 9GAG, Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur, Flickr, etc. (I’m not really sure what “American” means here – 9GAG for example is based in Hong Kong. I assume “American” indicates where the majority of the website’s crowd comes from).

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 03

The Internet Map - C-Section Comics - 04

You can explore the map yourself and find where your favorite sites are located by visiting http://internet-map.net/

And if you find any interesting insights, please share them with the rest of the class.

Digg Sold To Betaworks For $500,000

Yesterday Digg was sold to Betaworks for a mere $500,000.
In 2008, Digg turned off an acquisition offer by Google of 200 million dollars.

The only thing funnier/sadder (depends on your point of view) than the actual story, are the titles that technology blogs are using when covering the story.

What about you? Do you still Digg? And if so, what do you think of the move?

Overly Attached Bride

Woke up this morning and drew myself a caricature of “Overly Attached Girlfriend”.

Overly Attached Bride - a Caricature of Overly Attached Girlfriend

– “Overly Attached WHO?!”
– “Sorry grandma, here’s the brief…”

Overly Attached Girlfriend is a relatively new meme that was born on June 2012. It all started when a girl called Laina Walker posted this video on YouTube, in which she performs a mock version of Justin Bieber’s new single.

In her version Laina changed the lyrics, as they would have been sung by a crazed, overly attached girlfriend. It was all part of an attempt to win a contest which was held by Justin Bieber, but destiny (and the wise spirits of the Internet) had different plans for this girl – the video was picked up by Reddit and became an instant hit, receiving more than a million views in just over two days. Memes with Laina’s face began appearing soon after, evolving around the crazed needy girlfriend story.

Overly Attached Girlfriend Meme - Deleted Your Porn

Overly Attached Girlfriend Meme - I Just Met You

(via Know Your Meme)

The latest from Laina came yesterday, when she posted a Q&A video, answering questions from her numerous fans.

Will Laina be able to leverage her sudden fame to do something bigger, or will she fade away from out collective consciousness after her 15 minutes of fame pass? You can follow her Twitter account and her Facebook page and find out for yourself.

RIP Eduard Khil

Eduard Khil in Heaven - RIP Trololo Guy

 

Eduard Khil, a.k.a.” The Trololo Guy”, died today at age 77. I won’t write at length about Mr.Khil, as there are already numerous articles about him and the phenomenon he unknowingly created.

Personally, he  touched my life in two small ways

  1. His song made it to my YouTube playlist, and it’s one of those tunes that you can find very useful when you need to clear your mind and concentrate real hard on something.
  2. More importantly, he proved to me that it’s never too late to be discovered 🙂

 

Here’s the original “Trololo” song:

 

And here’s a beautiful piano version of the song by Lara:

 

 

Worship Me on Facebook

Buy the Poster Buy the T-Shirt

How we all react to Facebook likes

A while ago Matthew Inman (a.k.a The Oatmeal) published this cartoon titled “How to get more likes on Facebook”. In short, the cartoon’s message is this: if you want to get more likes on Facebook, focus less on self marketing and more on content. “Content is King” is the first thing they teach you on any internet marketing / SEO expert / social media douchery 101 course, so Inman’s message is not a new one. But it did make me think a bit about the way we react to Facebook likes.
As a web cartoonist, I find myself too often measuring a cartoon’s success by the amount of likes or shares it gets. While an important factor, it may be a bit overrated. There’s lots of online “scheisse” out there that’s insanely viral (mostly thanks to 11-year-old-cat-loving-rage-comic boys/girls), but from time to time you find a rare gem, a really insightful article / hilarious picture / inspiring cartoon that didn’t get as many likes you’d think it “deserves”.
Why is that? For one, some people are poor marketers – and here is where I slightly disagree with Inman: You can create the most compelling content but if you know nothing about marketing no one will ever be aware of it. Here’s an example: one thing I’ve learned over the years is that each social network has a different crowd with a different certain taste. Some of my cartoons will do well on Reddit but will never be stumbled upon. Others will become a hit on 9gag, but will get the downvote guillotine on Reddit. Therefore, it’s not just about submitting your content – it’s submitting the right content to the right social network.
So having marketing savvy is important, but is it enough? Not necessarily. It turns out that there is another factor to consider, according to this academic research on why content becomes viral. Here’s a short excerpt from the linked article, quoting one of the researchers, Prof. Karin Nahon:

Also puzzling for Nahon was what she describes as an “extreme power law” at work in the blogosphere. On the Internet, the power law means very few information providers capture the attention of most users. “For example, 98 percent of Internet users use only four search engines, and Google captures around 73 percent of that audience. In the real world that would be a monopoly,” she says. “It means we’re all depending on the queries and results of four search engines.”
The same imbalance holds in the blogosphere, where a few elite blogs capture most of the attention. The team identifies the most influential as “top blogs,” as opposed to “tail blogs,” the blogs of ordinary users and followers. Because the elites ignite the process of virality, they can frame messages and influence agendas, manipulating video content to enhance their own agendas and shape their own stories.

What does this mean? It means that there are a few “gatekeepers” who are providing us with most of the content we consume. Even in the Facebook era, what most of us like or share on Facebook was actually “discovered” for us (and often promoted to us) by those gatekeepers. For a publisher or a marketer, this means that like in real life, it also helps to have the right friends in the right places. In the online world, those friends are mainly power users in social networks, and reporters/editors in high-influence blogs and websites.

So what are our three lessons of the day? Great content is crucial, but you also have to be a good marketer. Powerful friends can help you with marketing. And lastly: likes, shares and stumbles are a good parameter for popularity, but they certainly are not a parameter for quality.

Having said all that, whenever one of my cartoons gets more than 1,000 likes, I spontaneously ejaculate in my pants. I guess the Facebook demon is in all of us.