To explain or describe the Harlem Shake meme is beyond the scope of this post.

(But sidebar: I’m enjoying it way more than Gangnam Style, in terms of having patience/interest in seeing every cubicle’s interpretation. Constraints = creativity, because #art.)

Anyway, thought I’d share this great graphic from YouTube’s Trends blog.

4,000+ Harlem Shake videos/day!

via YouTube Trends:

One of the unique directions the trend took rather early was spawned by the staff of Maker Studios, who created what’s currently the currently most-viewed version from their office. While it could have just remained a college-kid fad, Maker’s version helped signal that the trend was something any organization or office could be a part of…

something anybody can be a part of. That, my friend, is the difference between something that’s just viral, and something that’s a meme.

Sidebar: Who Pays Writers is a fun blog you should follow.

whopays:

Report: storyboard.tumblr.com pays $300 and up, depending on the depth of the piece. 

How you know Gawker feels at home on Tumblr:

Punctuation GIFs.

gawkercom:

This has to be an Illuminati conspiracy.

According to New York 1, there is expected to be some wind, 50 mph gusts, and a lot of rain. They do say that the storm is expected to hit New York late Wednesday and last until Thursday and that it “won’t be nearly as strong or devastating as Sandy.”

There’s only one appropriate reaction to this:

When the new Digg launched, it only allowed sign-up with Facebook (claiming it was an anti-spam measure). It was by far the biggest complaint I saw from anybody who checked it out. (Full disclosure, I didn’t like it either.)

But today Digg promised that by the end of the week, the dark days of Facebook-only would soon be ending.

[update- a week later, twitter sign-up not enabled, and they also took away ability to submit link with twitter. #sideeye

update #2: Got a nice tweet from a Digg dev, Twitter sign-up is still in the works, just taking longer than expected. No word on why Twitter-submit-URL disappeared, but probably related.

update #3: They added it! Digg now allows Twitter sign-up, and restored the ability to submit links with Twitter.]

rethinkdigg:

(Bold added by me.)

<snipped>

By the end of the week, Digg users will be able to:

• Sign up and sign in with a Twitter account 
• Choose whether or not their diggs are shared to Facebook Timeline 
• Retweet, Reply to, or Favorite tweets displayed on the Digg homepage [ed- This is pretty cool/rarely available directly from a site. Respect.]

Also, an interesting note from their previous blog post:

• We’ve seen over 50,000 story submissions, with about 100 stories making their way to the homepage

• We’re sending about 200 visitors per minute to great stories that make it to our Top section, from sites like Foodbeast, The Atlantic Wire and Nowness

Hold up. Unless… the lack of diversity is just leading to the same dominant domains who have their social media game honed and show up everywhere. No offense to The Atlantic Wire… but it’s getting crowded in Atlantic Stories on Aggregator Sites town. So I take back what I said about Digg getting a story diversity pass above. Only worth it when there’s a unique vision payoff.

Anyway, like I said earlier… No matter what happens to Digg, I think it’s rad that they’re trying new stuff.