A chronological list of Internet Memes from 1995 to the present (with videos and explanations).

Constantly being remixed with new subtitles on various themes, scenes from the 2004 film “Downfall (Der Untergang)” by Oliver Hirschbiegel, set in 1945 showing Hitler’s last 10 days in his Berlin bunker, recently turned into a meta meme, making fun of the remixes with a remix.

Hit play or watch Hitler Is A Meme on YouTube.

A small selection of other versions:

• Hitler Gets Banned
• The Downfall of the Cowboys
• Hillary’s Downfall
• HD DVD losing the High-Def War vs Blu Ray.

(Some subtitles might not be suitable for work).

Mmmmmmm, Weezer’s new memelicious music video Pork and Beans is the best meme inspired creation ever.

Shot May 7-10 in North Hollywood, CA, this video features a cast of, well, many! And what a cast! An amazing group of well known ‘Youtube celebs’ was tracked down and flown in so they could do their thing(s) with the Weezer men. Its pretty much impossible to properly describe what went down, so just have a look!

Hit play or watch Pork and Beans on YouTube.

I particularly liked it when Rivers Cuomo embraces the “Leave Britney Alone” guy. If anyone was ever overdo for a hug, it’s Chris Crocker.

Update: Wired’s interview with the director.

Ze Frank finally met with Ray, the composer and singer of the internet meme, “Kick Somebody’s Ass”. This has got to be one of Ze’s most memorable shows to date.

When Niall Kennedy found out a creative commons licensed photograph he had taken was being misused by Microsoft, he did what any net savvy blogger would do: he replaced the image with goatse. (Ok, personally I wouldn’t have gone that far, but it definitely got their attention).

From his site:

I license my text and image creations under Creative Commons licenses in the hope they will help other people tell a better story or unleash some sort of increased creativity upon the world of content I enjoy every day. When that content is used beyond the terms of my published license I choose to take various forms of action ranging from e-mailing or sending an instant message to the person (if I have it or can query accurate information without much effort) or by issuing legal documents of copyright violations to the offensing site or host.

Read the whole story: Handling of Microsoft’s copyleft violation.

I don’t know if it made the world a better place, but it certainly made my day. Jon and Duncan make an Earth Sandwich.

Previously, my own look into making the earth a sandwich.

I’ve been watching ZeFrank’s The Show for a couple of months now. I think he’s a brilliantly witty guy and I’m amazed at what appears to be the very little effort he seems to exert in coming up with clever and humorous shows on a daily basis.

A couple of weeks ago he discussed the possibility of making the earth a sandwich by placing two pieces of bread simultaneously directly opposite each other on the globe. I didn’t even bother investigating the find the opposite tool because (I thought) I knew that from here it was all just ocean on the other side of the world.

Now for the good news.

It turns out that near the small town of Many Berries (just a short drive from Lethbridge) there is an area of land that is situated exactly tangent from a small island on the other side of the globe that google has labelled as French Southern & Antarctic Lands.

Do you know what this means?!!! Ladies and gentlemen there is a good chance that I’ll be able to help in MAKING THE EARTH A SANDWICH! I just need to discover who in French Southern & Antarctic Lands reads my website, and then see if they would be willing to lay a piece of bread on the ground at these coordinates: 49.34843 by 69.4363? Both pieces of bread need to be sitting there simultaneously for the sandwich to exist so one of us might have to go out in the dark, which I’m totally willing to do.

Is there anybody out there on French Southern & Antarctic Lands? Hello? Anybody?

Within any collaborative effort, participants do their part giving so that there might be some kind of benefit reaped out of the collective work of the project. Derek Powazek proposes that perhaps the participants need not even be aware of their contributions in order for a system to form benefitting the perverbial greater good. Read about it in his post, Design for Selfishness.

As I read it, I started to think that as powerful search engines like Google and Yahoo continue to pull the web into one easily accessible medium, a dissection at different levels of the internet can be very revealing. For example, on any given community driven web page the creator may have big plans for the users input of finely crafted content but may or may not be actually offering anything for it. As Powazek points out there has to be a reason for the user to contribute, “If you’re making a product that’s asking users to do something—anything—that is going to add value to your company, ask yourself why anyone would bother.” There are plenty of not so good reasons that get passed off all the time: “Because it’s cool!”, “Because they contribute to Wikipedia/Slashdot/Whatever, and we’re just like that!”, or “Because we enable them to use their voice.”

But he goes on to explain that there are some good answers too:

Because we solve a problem they have. Because we give them something they can’t get anywhere else. Because we enable a kind of communication that’s unlike anything else. Because we make their lives more convenient. Because we give them, or save them, money. Because we enable them to do more with less. Because they told us they wanted to.

The whole scenario reminds me of the concept presented in Richard Dawkins famous book, “The Selfish Gene”. The book’s thesis is that in any living creature the genes that get passed on are the ones whose mutations serve their own implicit interests, not necessarily those of the organism, much less any larger level.

Let me use tagging photos as an example (I know this is the same one Powazek used, but it’s the best one). Within Flickr.com users have the ability to put tags on their photos. This helps them to find their own photos quickly and easily when they search by tag, but it also benefits the flickr community at large because they are able to search everyone’s photos by their tags.

The same is true within the context of the blogosphere as a whole. Here individuals write about specific topics and whatever their motivation the result is we are provided with a vast expanse of searchable content.

Thinking about all the posts and topics I’ve written about, I hope you, the good readers of this site, find something useful here.

My friend Kim Siever hit me with the four things meme the other day. Apparently it started on LiveJournal and has spread across the blogosphere. Some of the bigger sites that I follow on my RSS reader have been participating too.

• Jeffrey Zeldman
• Jason Kottke
• Matthew Haughey
• 37 Signals

There is something particularly intriguing about the simplicity of the meme and yet it seems to derive answers that you might never expect. For instance, who would have ever thought that I had experience burying mines? (They weren’t live and they were for de-mining research purposes).

There are many more examples of the meme via google search four things meme.

Update: A couple more to add to my list…

• Dooce
• Powazek