2005.02.12
First, Second or Last
(Almost) every day I cruise the interweb reading various sites and keeping an eye out for things to post to OOKEE.com. In my surfing I’ve noticed, as many others have, that there are a few sites that seem to be the originators of link memes and many many more that are disseminators of those memes. In essence one site posts something and hundreds or thousands more post the same thing to their own sites.
In many ways bOING bOING is one of the originators, as is Slashdot or Fark. These sites have the momentum and energy that drives people to them and if these people notice something really cool, weird, or interesting they send them in as suggestions to the site and it may get posted there; cool! These sites are going to post things that, in general, aren’t well known. After all, that’s why people go to the sites; to read things they didn’t know already.
However, I also travel to lesser known sites like glassdog, #!/usr/bin/girl and Oink! (no, I don’t speak Spanish) among dozens of other sites. Sometimes I will see really cool links on these sites and many days later see them on some of the supposed “originator” sites. This got me thinking that the originators are in reality the smaller sites.
Yet this is wrong, too. The originator is, really, the creator of a site or meme. Jib Jab makes another hilarious animation which makes them the originator. Everyone else is the disseminator and there really is no “first” because there’s no way to determine that ranking. I have no problem being a disseminator with OOKEE.com. I’ve always told people that it’s just a linkblog and I started it so I wouldn’t have to keep sending out spam-like emails showing everyone the latest funny link I’d found. Linkblogs are, by their nature, almost never originators unless, like OOKEE.com’s Top Five or Reviews (buried in the movies category) they have some original content.
My friend Zapski, however, is about to be an originator. In the latest poll on OOKEE.com (UPDATE: the polls are long since gone…) I made up the Zombie Anti-Defamation League (ZADL) because in the past week there’s been a lot of zombie stuff on the site. Zapski is taking the idea of the ZADL and building a website for it, which you can preview here (it will probably move once he builds it up more).
So congratulations to Zapski for publishing the first website dedicated to Zombie rights. You, my friend, are an originator, the first to be building an idea into something viral. A lot of my friends put up original content in the form of commentary (similar to this site) but none of them that I’m aware of have put up something that has the potential to be featured in one of the big name sites. I can’t wait for the day to be the first in something myself!
Comments Off Categorized: friends geek site thoughts
You can follow any responses to this entry with a RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
