Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Article 2: Google Buys Youtube
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15196982/ns/business-us_business/t/google-buys-youtube-billion/#.TsQqYsOAq0t
In October 2006, Google Inc. announced its decision to purchase YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, for $1.65 billion. Under the terms of the deal, YouTube would remain independently operated at the outset, keeping a separate brand and keeping its headquarters in San Bruno along with Youtubes co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen as employees, and all YouTube's other employees will remain with the company. Google will keep also keep running Google Video, a less profitable site.
The deal had put pressure on Yahoo to buy facebook.com in order to stay in the market. The history of youtube is quite simple. It started in Hurley's garage in 2005, he made the site to be able to share videos with family online. Since then the website has blossomed and now shows more than 100 million video clips per day along with it's worldwide audience of 72.1 million in august 2006.
I think that $1.65 bn is a nice price for a simple concept. The dealmaking reflects how the growth of online, user-created video has emerged as a potential source of revenue for the sagging recording industry. There have been and still are many copyright infringement lawsuits against Youtube (usually by Sony or other companies) for the use of music on this site, I think this is ridiculous as Youtube is an easy way to advertise music before you download it. In 2011, Google now owns Youtube, Blogger, Gmail, FeedBurner, Picnik and all the other assorted Google apps. I wonder whether it's a good or bad thing that Google owns a huge chunk of the internet.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Article 1: The Rise of Boxxy: An Internet Meme
* http://boxxystory.blogspot.com/2009/01/rise-of-boxxy.html
For those of you don't know who boxxy is she's a character created by Catie Wayne. In early 2006, this young sixteen year old girl who liked to hang around the anime social networking website, Gaia Online, made a few videos for her friends and put them up on youtube (video 1 and video 2). Like most of the thousands of videos uploaded everyday it was lost amongst the crowd and forgotten. That was until sometime in late December when someone stumbled across her videos and started posting them on the big image board sites like 4chan (4chan, if you don’t know is the birthplace of many of the internet’s more endearing fads). The presence of the videos created a dispute on 4chan, leading to various flame wars and hacking incidents among factions that claimed to either support or oppose Boxxy.
The subsequent reaction to Boxxy seemed to surprise even the internet, (which is used to the unusual). There was an explosion of controversy, splitting the male residents of 4chan into two groups: the lovers of Boxxy and the haters. Some wanted to name her queen of the internet. Some just madly wanted her to go away and stop clogging up their forums. (The female forum residents, the nerd girls, were just perplexed) In a matter of days, Boxxy went from being nowhere to being everywhere.
Reprisal
Many of the most virulent haters, who saw the Boxxy meme spreading across the internet like a plague, the ones who found the situation intolerable, formed a coalition called the Center for Boxxy Control and Restriction (CBRC).
They declared war on the Boxxy meme and vowed to expose her identity and use it as blackmail to get her to leave the internet forever. Boxxy posted a reply to this in a video (video 3). Through some tough detective work, they managed to find an older youtube account of Boxxy and later to get an email and to hack into her video accounts. With control over her youtube, they sent Boxxy a video telling her never to post again or they’d release her contact info to the world. Boxxy subsequently disappeared from the internet. The Boxxy lovers were defeated.
That was seemingly the end of the Boxxy meme. It lasted roughly twenty days, but in that brief time, Boxxy scored almost a million google searches.The internet is full of thousands of cases like this, they come and go and disappear and most people are completely unaware that they ever happened.
This is a story of the underside of the Internet. In my opinion, there shouldn't be a huge deal about a meme, or any memes for that matter, on the internet. It shows how a lot of people just jump on the bandwagon for anything that's 'popular' and easily loved or hated on. I also didn't understand why so many people hated this girl and they didn't even know her. It is odd to think things like this happen, it just goes to show what sheep people are. It's interesting as a quirk but this mass mentality causes things to spread wildly out of control in the blink of an eye.
* this is an old article written in 2009 during the rise of Boxxy and since then Boxxy has returned to internet uploading new videos in 2011.
Boxxy's youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Boxxybabee
For those of you don't know who boxxy is she's a character created by Catie Wayne. In early 2006, this young sixteen year old girl who liked to hang around the anime social networking website, Gaia Online, made a few videos for her friends and put them up on youtube (video 1 and video 2). Like most of the thousands of videos uploaded everyday it was lost amongst the crowd and forgotten. That was until sometime in late December when someone stumbled across her videos and started posting them on the big image board sites like 4chan (4chan, if you don’t know is the birthplace of many of the internet’s more endearing fads). The presence of the videos created a dispute on 4chan, leading to various flame wars and hacking incidents among factions that claimed to either support or oppose Boxxy.
The subsequent reaction to Boxxy seemed to surprise even the internet, (which is used to the unusual). There was an explosion of controversy, splitting the male residents of 4chan into two groups: the lovers of Boxxy and the haters. Some wanted to name her queen of the internet. Some just madly wanted her to go away and stop clogging up their forums. (The female forum residents, the nerd girls, were just perplexed) In a matter of days, Boxxy went from being nowhere to being everywhere.
Reprisal
Many of the most virulent haters, who saw the Boxxy meme spreading across the internet like a plague, the ones who found the situation intolerable, formed a coalition called the Center for Boxxy Control and Restriction (CBRC).
They declared war on the Boxxy meme and vowed to expose her identity and use it as blackmail to get her to leave the internet forever. Boxxy posted a reply to this in a video (video 3). Through some tough detective work, they managed to find an older youtube account of Boxxy and later to get an email and to hack into her video accounts. With control over her youtube, they sent Boxxy a video telling her never to post again or they’d release her contact info to the world. Boxxy subsequently disappeared from the internet. The Boxxy lovers were defeated.
That was seemingly the end of the Boxxy meme. It lasted roughly twenty days, but in that brief time, Boxxy scored almost a million google searches.The internet is full of thousands of cases like this, they come and go and disappear and most people are completely unaware that they ever happened.
This is a story of the underside of the Internet. In my opinion, there shouldn't be a huge deal about a meme, or any memes for that matter, on the internet. It shows how a lot of people just jump on the bandwagon for anything that's 'popular' and easily loved or hated on. I also didn't understand why so many people hated this girl and they didn't even know her. It is odd to think things like this happen, it just goes to show what sheep people are. It's interesting as a quirk but this mass mentality causes things to spread wildly out of control in the blink of an eye.
* this is an old article written in 2009 during the rise of Boxxy and since then Boxxy has returned to internet uploading new videos in 2011.
Boxxy's youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Boxxybabee
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