Slashdot Mirror
Contagious Media Showdown
Philipp Lenssen writes "In the Contagious Media Showdown, competitors plant addictive memes to see who's best at viral marketing. The contest pages officially launched yesterday. The grand prize (most unique visitors) is $2000, with three other prizes at $1000 each for most links, most popular entry with a Creative Commons license, or first site with an Alexa ranking higher than 20,000."
Get linked from Slashdot.
Cowboyneal's Boobies.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Viral marketing? Addictive memes?
Sounds like just another SEO contest to me. The only twist: not every one needs to use the same stupid made-up keyword.
DEATH RAY OF DOOM
How's that for clickability? Come oooon, you know you want to...
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
There are several places to "buy" a high Alexa rank.
All they need are hits to their counting script. It's not like the Google rank which is externally weighted, you can put an exit pop-up on a website, or even just an iframe and push visitors from anywhere through alexa's counter.
All proceeds go to help fund MPAA/RIAA efforts. Thank you for your help.
The contest site presentation is flawed (and therefore in this case the contest has been invalidated IMHO). By displaying and sorting links to the websites involved in the competition by rank, they are driving the leader's scores up (because people will tend to click on the leading links to see why everyone else thought it was so cool).
They should have simply supplied the link in a non-discrinating sort (such as alpabetical) and a very brief description of the site's theme. The ranking should not have been displayed until after the contest was completed.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I just lost the game.
Reading this reminded me of something else that fits in the same realm as viral marketing, and that is The Game, a viral social phenomen. Confused?
"Free Lesbian porn , hot naked girls on motor bikes " as a title . ,, a big bold "Can not be found here , but what we do have is..." no-one is going to return and if the "But what we do have is.. " bit is intresting then you will get lots of links by people who found it funny and were not too narked off you didn't have a heap load of porn
then after that when someone clicks on the page
Simple principle of marketing "Sex sells". Simple principle of the internet "Its full of porn"
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Yeah, it's wierd. Most virals are. Odd thing is that in this case, since it is at the top of the list, more people will click on it first, and won't get bored and just go away. Being at the top ensures that you are at the top.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Excellent... wasted bandwidth and more spam. Hooray.
You'll forgive me for not being overly excited about this story. C'mon slashdot, this is a new low, even for you...
Why? does he have Trucker Boobs?
air and light and time and space
I just clicked on the #1 link and I imagine a lot of Slashdotters will do the same. This is bound to have an effect on the outcome.
Wouldn't that list give an unfair advantage to people already on top? Nearly everyone who clicks on the /. link will then check out the top one, two, or three sites... how's that fair to those trying to catch up?
are you at least cute?
That might sway some to make an offer.
The world according to SComps
To all the people whining about it being on slashdot, the link is to a site with ALL of the afoe mentioned sites..
Although, this 'contest' isn't really a contest... It would have been better to do it in a controlled manner, let the sites spread by word of mouth et cetera.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
With the "Rankings" list linked off the frontpage of Slashdot, many thousands will see the rankings list wondering what the heck this thing is about. They will then do the next logical thing and click on the top entry, or few entries, in the ranking list. Viola! Game Over. (and the experiment results questionable at best)
could be interesting to do a slashdot vs Fark viral marketing showdown. See who comes out tops.
Here is one I like http://scavenger.contagiousmedia.org/ from a guy that is doing a cool adaptation http://phiffer.org/tiddly/ of Tiddly Wiki http://tiddlywiki.com/ --which is just plain cool.
Yes I remember there being some quiz question about "On the US governments website, which state has the most views of their fiscal statistics" or similar. Turned out to be Alabama, simply because they were at the top of the list.
Nonsense! My "aardvark on fire" will beat out "Aaron's House of Tacos"!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Check out the user agents for the #1 site.s age_200505.html#DAYSTATS
http://cryingwhileeating.com/plesk-stat/webstat/u
Strange!
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
William Gibon's book Pattern Recognition deals heavily with viral marketing and the creation of subcultures. It's a pretty interesting read, and a definite departure from his other stuff (his only book written in the present day).
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Round up everyone who still drop the word "meme" into conversation and beat them bloody with aluminum softball bats.
Alright, alright, it may not be much of a "strategy" but words can't express how good it would feel.
This was my favorite from cryingwhileeating.com:
Robert
What he's eating:
Fried chicken
What he's crying about:
Babe, pig in the city
so that explains why I wear a brain condom while watching tv / listening to radio / etc /
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Dude, that word doesn't mean what you think it does.
But it sure sounds cool, huh?
They all suck. What you really need is this. No contest.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
isn't this, in itself, a meme? :)
What a great idea! I'm going to start my own "Contagious Media Showdown".
--
make install -not war
Everybody, let's all click on the lowest ranking site together...
Ready, one, two, three, go!!!!
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
NPR covered this story yesterday.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
...the four hamburgers singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen. (stop-motion animation, most likely)
How many clicked on the "Girls who love Geeks" link first? (the other link is better)
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I think they're going to have a hard time coming up with something more contagious than the dirty guy.
Trying to view the site, I'm getting:
DB Error: connect failed: [nativecode=Too many connections] ** mysql://contagious:l0abck4@localhost/contagious
Is it just me, or is that their MySQL database name, username and password (password modified to protect the innocent)? I've seen too much information from error messages, but this one takes the cake
All your base are belong to us.
How fitting for sites linked off of /. ...
Bager bager bager bager bager bager
Mushroom MUSHROOM!
As an experiement, we created an online German Language Resource to see what effect (if any) Slashdot has on our number of registered visitors.
with the Time Traveler Convention. I refuse to use the word "meme," but its Slashdotting triggered an avalanche of mainstream publicity, culminating in a front-page New York Times article; Slashdot is more relevant than I once thought. Total hits exceeded 1 million before the Times article came out.
scary: that's a real website!
It seems that http://www.thebrainfreeze.com/ was produced by 7-11. I called Kevin Gardner and talked to his assistant, they knew about the website but wouldn't confirm or deny that they had their hands in it. Seems mighty suspicious to me! A new twist to viral marketing? Brandon
Little Johnny was sitting in class one day when the teacher called on him to use the word "contageous" in a sentence.
Little Johny thought for a moment, and then said, "It will take that contageous to paint that house if she doesn't get a bigger brush."
Oh, This was a brilliant idea. Contestants are now tolling mailing lists with links to their crappy entries.
Right now I can think of a few contagions I'd like to see the backers of this contest infected with.
Yeah. You bastards. I'm blaming /. when my entry comes last!
(And yes, I have heard of grouphug.us, and I have heard of it as of yesterday.)
fortune -o
http://www.spazingavin.com/