Meme: ‘A self-propagating unit of social imitation; something that people repeat and pass along’. Or, ‘Memes replicate data. And just as genes replicate genetic data, memes replicate cultural ideas’. Or, ‘lolcats’.

However you describe them, everyone loves a good meme. And, since the term was popularised by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book ‘The selfish gene’, advertising has been responsible for generating many well-known examples. (Here’s one, oops sorry…no, two examples (in one): ‘Will it blend?’ for Blendtec.) And with the connectedness and social media channels offered by the web for brands to spread and share content, you would have thought that conditions were perfect for many more… Read More »

Yesterday Wikipedia announced it would be joining the protest against the American SOPA proposal by going dark and effectively disabling all English language content on Wednesday the 18th.

The protest originates from Reddit. Early last week the surfacing site blogged that they would be blacking out from 8am to 8pm on the 18th in a blog post that outlined how dangerous they believe the SOPA proposals to be.

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This month we have the second infographic produced by UK Digital Agency – Freestyle Interactive – for English Premier League clubs. With Social Media becoming increasingly influential amongst clubs and players, the Midlands based agency has promised to track the growth as well as highlight any creative examples of fan engagement. Some key ‘take aways’ include the combined leagues Facebook fans approaching 50 million, Manchester United are the only team without Twitter and Arsenal’s 360 Panorama Facebook app.

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The Daily Telegraph is reporting that the Italian Concordia cruise ship disaster, which claimed six lives, was preceded by a pre-planned stunt advertised on Facebook.

The paper says the ship sailed perilously close to the coast of Giglio so that the ship’s head waiter could salute his family on land. Read More »

While Ricky Gervais did not gnaw off the hand that feeds him at the Golden Globes this year the event did rack up a lot of attention and a great deal of that on Twitter as Meryl Streep picked up an award for ‘The Iron Lady’ and Kate Winslet one for HBO’s ‘Mildred Pierce’.

In all a whopping 822,431 million tweets were sent on the night. But who won the tweet of the night? It wasn’t Gervais. Read More »

The fallout from the AOL acquisition of Techcrunch continues as former writer, Sarah Lacy, launches a news site, called PandoDaily, which is being dubbed “TechCrunch 2.0 by some.

PandoDaily, which will focus almost exclusively on tech start-ups, launches today and is backed by a number of investors including TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, who left the site he founded in September unhappy (but richer) after the earlier sale to AOL. Read More »