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It’s Friday: Bring on the Bitchmemes

Fridays tend to be slow news days. Just look at today, nothing very interesting is happening except for some 3G iPhone speculation.

In most industries, that would mean people go home early. Not so in the tech blogosphere. All those bored writers have to do something after all (fresh air is highly overrated) and so one of my hobbies has become watching for the regular Friday afternoon fight over some or the other petty topic breaking out on Techmeme: a bitchmeme for short (I need to trace the history of that word in another post, but here is one of the first posts where I noticed it being used last October).

As part of the Techmeme echochamber effect, the arguments quickly spread through the blogosphere, get repeated on every single blog and, in the end, usually lead to absolutely nothing.

What makes a good bitchmeme?

1. name calling: nothing like a personal attach to get the blood flowing (see LacyGate, Riley vs. Gray, and the FlickrFan disaster)
2. attacks on or by the big guys or any other polarizing figure (like Dave Winer, Arrington etc.)
3. Schadenfreude mixed with jealousy (why does Scoble need to have more than 5000 friends? why don’t I have 5000 friends?)
4. a Friday totally devoid of any other news (see Amazon S3 failure)

A History of Bitchmemes:

Mar 21: Sony’s Crapware removal fee and Apple pushing Safari onto Windows desktops – a special dual Bitchmeme

Mar 14: Duncan Riley vs. Louis Gray 

March 10: The Zuckerberg interview also known as Lacygate – a Monday Bitchmeme

Feb 22: FaceBook Fatigue

Feb 15: Amazon S3 down for a few minutes

Jan 11: Gizmodo Gate

Jan 8: The Lazysphere meme

Jan 3: Scoble’s Facebook account disabled and then enabled again – an unusual Thursday bitchmeme, but also the best documented one

Dec 28: FlickrFan – maybe the pettiest of bitchmemes

Some other big Friday afternoon stories which explain the absence of bitchmemes on that day:

Yahoo board meeting (Feb and Yahoo rejecting the bid the next day (Feb 9)

Microsoft announcing plans to buy Yahoo (Feb 1)

TechCrunch Google/Digg speculation (Mar 7) – it’s was almost a bitchmeme, but didn’t create much controversy but a lot of echo

ha ha ha nice. you’re doing a better job covering them than me…but i still own the domain

also don’t forget the original one (at least when I started keep track) – the “gaming” of techmeme in october 2007

http://www.parislemon.com/2007/10/case-for-bitchmeme.html

then there was the “lazysphere” debate in January:

http://www.parislemon.com/2008/01/lazysphere-debate-our-first-bitchmeme.html

I was thinking about that today as well. What about a positive bitchmeme for once where we all talk about how wonderful things are or compare stats? What’s that called? And can I kick it off this time?

[...] posting aspirations seem trivial in comparison. See for yourself, in all it’s glory, not just an open invitation to the weekend bitchmeme, but a full-blown history of the [...]