It is can be hugs tiem now, yes.

[alexr_rwx]

Not long ago, Esther eponis brought to my attention the notion of "ticky", which is apparently a cultural trope in the fandom world, maybe particularly on LJ. It's a tendency to use check-boxes in your web surveys. It's interesting how there are little social norms in different communities -- check-boxes, at least on the surface, don't immediately have anything to do with fandom or fanfic or anything else, right? And I was struck by how much social sciences work could be done on online communities, and how little of it is actually getting done -- or if it is, it's well under my radar.

But. Xeni, on BoingBoing, has pointed out David McRaney's social-sciences-style overview of the LOLcats/image-macros community thing.

Anil Dash, internet culture maven and Six Apart VP, has writted u an articles about LOLcats grammah. (but I eated it)

And. Mr. Gordon McNaughton of Chelmsford, Essex, has produced a LOLcat builder that lets you LOL nearly effortlessly. This sort of tool, it would seem, encourages the continuation of the status quo in LOLcats... innovations in the field may still have to come through some more general image-manipulation program.

Speaking of online communities, though -- what really really baffles me is the comments on the xkcd syndication. xkcd is this beautiful, erudite, subtle thing ("A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language") with jokes about Fourier transforms, self-reference, and the subversion of language... and the comments on the feed seem inane: "FIRST POST!" or "I don't get it" or "I laughed!". Is there something about xkcd particularly, or is it more a culture of webcomics feeds on LJ? Value judgements aside, I think we should try to make sense of this phenomenon...

Comments

[ridingsloth.livejournal.com]

I too had noticed the XKCD phenomenon, and have been baffled by it. On the other hand, reading the News/Blag from the site (which is updated only rarely but always with amazing things) I see the commentators are of a much higher caliber (see how I implicitly value-judged there?) than the LJ comment-makers. Thus, I restrain myself to only reading comments on the one.

Explanation? Random friending. Shotgun style friending with no regard for content. It's madness I tell you.

[lindseykuper]

Here's my unproven theory about the xkcd feed phenomenon.

"Intelligent" and "good at the Internet"* correlate, but they're not the same group. GATI folks sometimes comment well and sometimes they comment poorly, but I think they tend not to comment on LJ feeds, because they know that the comments are ephemeral: they drop off the feed's journal forever after a certain number of posts, so what's the point? And intelligent people tend to write good comments wherever.

Of the intelligent people who read xkcd, I'm betting almost all of them are GATI. So what you see in the comments on the xkcd syndicated account is really the bottom of the barrel: neither intelligent nor GATI.

By contrast, the Dinosaur Comics audience is still intelligent, but less proportionately GATI. So a culture of good commenting develops on the DC syndicated account's journal, until even the GATI types join in, and then it just keeps feeding on itself.

Heh. "feeding."

* I'm assuming that this collection of traits includes "observant of how LiveJournal syndication works".

[scottique.livejournal.com]

Fir-- oh, third. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG-Xs7mBwU)

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19