Double Team GB Gold medalist Mo Farah is becoming something of an internet sensation.

The 29-year-old Londoner who ran the races of his life to win the 5,000m and the 10,000m at London 2012 already has two memes devoted to his name.

The first is his signature ‘Mobot’ hands to head pose that became such a hit with Olympic fans and rivaled that of Usain Bolt’s pose — leading to the two posing side by side. The second was his arms outspread pose as he crossed the finished line to the .

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Facebook has just published some fascinating lists looking at what millions of people have posted on Facebook during 2011. They call it “memology” and it takes the pulse of Facebook’s 800 million strong global community. Charlie Sheen captured people’s attention in March, when his trademark “winning,” “tiger blood” and “goddesses” memes took off. Later that month, military operations got underway in Libya, prompting a surge in status updates mentioning “Libya” and “Gaddafi.”

The marriage of Kate Middleton and Prince William dominated the conversation in April and days later it was  the death of Osama bin Laden, which became the most talked about event on Facebook for 2011. On May 1, almost 10 percent of all status updates in English mentioned news of his death. On a lighter note 2011 was also the year of “lms” and “tbh” went viral. Read More »

Someone on the internet once said “a week’s a long time in meme”.  It sure damn is.  Here’s this week’s best bits, freshly curated by my team @Rubber_Republic.

People are awesome

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There’s no real reason why kittens are king of the meme – they just are.  So to celebrate this we’ve organised the monthly meet-up #KittenCamp – where we share memes, drink beers and dress up as cats (my favorite’s Jess from Postman Pat).

Ignoring the cat costumes, here’s a taste of some of the memes from this month’s #KittenCamp:

Standing cat (via Know Your Meme)

Augmented Reality 1.0 – Urban Landscape Hacking

(AR) has become a massive internet meme format in its own right over the last 12 months, with one of the best examples being Iron Man 2′s recent AR effort.
However, it’s always nice to see technology eating itself and going
back to basics. Augmented reality 1.0 does exactly this by hacking
reality the old school way – using objects, photos and even pencils.
Michael Hughes was one of the first on the scene with this analogue
approach to augmenting reality by replacing iconic landmarks with cheap
souvenir replicas. This analogue landscape hacking meme has now spread,
with a trend towards mashing up old photos into street scenes, and
pencil sketches . All proof that analogue can often do memes better
than digital . . . [Thanks to Brain Pickings for this tip].

Unicorns

In the fantasy world of an awesome and cartooned internet nothing holds more awesomenimity than a unicorn. Confirmed by Dallas Clayton’s very awesome book.

Serenading Unicorn is the latest addition to the unicorn meme. One we’re pretty certain that Charlie the Unicorn really brought to the fore:

So if you like memes, come to our next #KittenCamp in Soho, on the 8th June.  Visit our site for more info . . .

@Rubber_Republic

Where there’s a blockbuster there’s an internet meme – especially when the blockbuster involves big names and a tonne of special FX.  So it’s not surprising that Iron Man II’s been given the meme once-over by both the studio (officially) and online community (unofficially).

Possibly the best community meme has to be the Iron Man vs Hugh Grant mash-up.  One of the secret ingredients to a successful meme is its title – and nothing is more intriguing and clickable than “Iron Man vs Hugh Grant”.

The official studio virals have taken a more sober fan-orientated approach, building on the Stark Industries narrative of the film to create an extended and more intimate film experience for the Iron Man fan-boys.

And possibly most interestingly is where official viral meets community, where we see the uber-YouTube film reviewer Blunty3000 review the film as Iron Man using the studios super-cool Augmented Reality app.

This is a perfect follow up to my blog piece yesterday about Simon Cowell and his mastery of the social media meme (in the forms of Susan Boyle, Paul Potts and the like).  

A brilliantly observed piece of meme analysis from the guys at Rocketboom (one of my favorite vlogs) – who are also the brains behind blog project Knowyourmeme.com – the home of the modern internet meme.