Rick Astley rocks MTV's vote, leads poll by 20 million
HOLD THE PHONE: There's something confusing happening here. MTV's post appears to be referring to the poll about whether Astley should be in the contest, and not the contest itself. This is perplexing, given that we haven't heard anything about a campaign to game this mini-poll, let alone one that's already generated 20 million votes. I am attempting to untangle this sordid mess, so please standby.
CORRECTION (4:40pm): Indeed, I had the wrong number. The 20 million votes MTV cited were in reference to voting on the 'does he deserve it' poll, not the "Best Act Ever" contest--although both have been bot-driven. As to the contest voting itself, MTV has not released numbers, but Mark Lancaster of bestactever.com, the site leading the automatic charge in the main contest, says there are now "26-27 million confirmed votes" from the RickVoter bot, plus another 4 million from people who sent in screen shots of tallies from home-brewed bots. Meaning a likely 30+ million Astley votes for the contest so far. What we don't know is what kind of lead that gives Astley, especially given that Tokio Hotel fans have apparently 'bot in' to the game as well.
ORIGINAL POST:
According to MTV UK, '80s pop-rock legend Rick Astley has clocked in 99.98% of the 20 million votes cast, eking out the narrowest of victories over his competitors in the Best Act Ever competition.
So I was fudging the headline: Astley didn't actually capture all 20 million of the poll's total votes, just 19,996,000. That leaves a cache of 4,000 votes for Britney, Christina, Green Day, Tokio Hotel and U2 to apportion among themselves.
MTV Europe, huffing cheekily on the smoke of a memefire it set a few days ago, is now polling voters on the all-important meta question of whether Astley deserves "to be in the same category of those great aritsts" or not. This is a new level of inanity, given that the site was the one that decided to put Astley -- a write-in candidate -- on the ballet in the first place.
But, as Alexa shows, the Astley hijinks are paying dividends for MTV UK -- the site's traffic is spiking (independent of all the phony requests), suggesting that MTV may have a legitimate culture coup on their hands.
The site has also shown a sense of humor about the vote fixing. At one point site administrators shot back at ballot stuffers by redirecting auto-vote attempts to a video of Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up," effectively ReverseRickRolling hundreds of people.
Aussie Mark "Vote4Rick" Lancaster, the brains behind bestactever.com , may be surprised to hear that MTV is touting the 20-million number*. In an e-mail exchange last night, Lancaster guessed that only about 8 million of the RickVoter's automated vote attempts had gone through, though he added that home-brewed vote-bots may have added significantly to the tally:
"They haven't bothered to put in a delay of any form and this has begun to overload MTV's servers," he wrote -- and indeed, MTV's site appeared to be intermittently troubled yesterday. "To help slow this down, we've increased the artificial delay in our scripts so that we're doing voting slower. We want Rick to win, but we don't want to destroy MTV's bandwidth in the process."
What a guy, right?
A representative from MTVE has not answered communications about the Astley voting, and we don't know if they've contacted the reclusive Astley about appearing on the EMAs in the event that his election is ruled legitimate.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that if he agrees to go on the show, the election will stand, and if he turns it down, MTV will rule that our votes didn't count. And that would be a major run-around, letdown and desertion.
-- David Sarno
* see note at the top
Related:
Oops, I voted for Rick Astley 961 times
Rick Astley's MTV Award Hacked, With Pleasure [Wired]
Web Scout's March interview with Rick Astley (includes audio)
MTV to fans: Is Rick Astley the 'Best Act Ever'?
Oops, I voted for Rick Astley 961 times
Wasting no time in getting their man elected "Best Act Ever," the large and mostly anonymous under-culture of Rick Astley fans has already deployed a device to defraud the voting on MTV Europe's website.
The "RickVoter" is a very basic utility that simply navigates to MTV's voting page and votes for Astley...over and over and over.
MTV most likely didn't bother to build a big security wall to defend against this kind of ballot stuffing, but it seems clear that having left the contest open to being tinkered with, they essentially guaranteed a win for Astley.
Why do I say this? Consider the following anecdote. I loaded the RickVoter to test it out, curious if it actually did what it said it would. But after looking at it for a couple of minutes, I got distracted by a few phone calls and e-mails. By the time I got back to my experiment a half-hour later, I saw that it had been busily voting the entire time, and I had registered my support for Astley 961 votes. Er, my bad?
I would beg for MTV's forgiveness for contributing to the fixing of this election, but there's no real point. If even a few dozen people have left the RickVoter on all night long, then Astley no doubt has hundreds of thousands, or millions, of votes, and 961 is barely a drop in the pond.
The question now is whether MTV will consider the results valid or if they'll throw them out because of the irregularities here. One could easily argue that they invited this kind of mischief by putting Astley on the ballot in the first place and that pleading ignorance to the perils of malwebolence should not be a defense in this case. But I still think that if they're smart they'll just declare Astley the winner, get him on the show, and take a shower in the ratings windfall that would follow.
ADDED: From Digg commenter Nat3r: "i had about 100 tabs of bestactever.com open when this first happened, with 5 votes every two second... meaning every two seconds i would vote 500 times...i left it on for 17 hours." You do the math...
— David Sarno
Related:
Web Scout's March interview with Rick Astley (includes audio)
MTV to fans: Is Rick Astley the 'Best Act Ever'?
MTV to fans: Is Rick Astley the 'Best Act Ever'?
MTV Europe has a surprise contender in this year's 2008 European Music Awards. Having opened up the category of "Best Act Ever" to write-in nominations, MTVE is the latest to fall victim to the now-aged "RickRoll" meme as fans selected Rick Astley to battle with Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Green Day, U2 and Tokio Hotel for this highest of award show high honors.
Not only that, by allowing fans to vote on the winner, MTVE has left the door open to the same kind of trickery that restored Astley to the spotlight this year after 20 years of radio silence.
There could be nothing more "lulzy" than a netwide campaign to steal the all-time musical crown for Astley, a guy who unhesitatingly called the song that twice made him famous "naff."
At the same time, getting the reclusive Astley on international television to sing "Never Gonna Give You Up" one more time could be a major publicity coup for MTV. Viewers are used to MTV standbys like U2 and Britney, but a chance for Astley to RickRoll the world on live television would be a special treat indeed.
— David Sarno
Twitterers christen election page with debate drinking game
Today was the debut of Twitter's new election page, where you can get a live feed of every last election-related tweet singing out across the land. As you might have expected, monitoring it is a frantic experience of democracy in action. Tweets with a candidate's name in them are crowding the page like rush hour commuters on the 405. They run the predictable gamut from the banal ("The first debates are on tonight and i'm at work! Thank god for the dvr. Obama ftw!") to the partisan ("I am here to support John McCain and Sarah Palin for President and Vice Prasident. I believe they are the best choice for America") to attempts at cheeky humor ("I wonder if Obama will respond 'present' to the first question tonight?").
It's not clear who would want to take advantage of grass-roots information that is so blade by blade. Except, of course, as Silicon Alley Insider points out, the political press. This should prove to be a treasure trove of quotable quotes and trend-story-ready memes.
Here's one of those already: a developing debate drinking game.
As one Twitterer explained it:
Can't help myself. R/T: Drinking rules for debate: #obamashot every time Obama says "change", #mccainshot when McCain says "my friends"
(Here's an explanation of how that "#" sound allows Twitterers to create a separate channel for all the tweets on this subject.)
What could be more bipartisan, more patriotic, more deeply in the spirit of American unity than an election-themed drinking game? And so I leave you with the final lines of Walt Whitman's ode to the Twitter-like chorus of voices that makes up our nation, "I Hear America Singing":
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day -- at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
--Maria Russo
Meme of the moment: McCain's suspension
Since John McCain suspended his presidential campaign it's been suspension-mania on the Web.
Late night TV was a suspension party last night, and this morning clips of the best suspension-related stuff are going strong. David Letterman's extended rant on McCain's suspension is currently the top video on YouTube, with almost 800,000 views, and over at colbertnation.com Stephen Colbert's announcement that he was suspending his show leads the site.
Twitterers have gone to town on the concept, announcing that they are suspending work, breakfast, lunch, dinner, their naps, their diets, their faith in humanity, disbelief and, of course, twittering until the crisis has passed. Oh, and one John Dickerson was the first twitterer to suspend all suspension jokes.
Several blogs have called for the New York Mets to suspend their pennant race. A cooking blog has suspended cooking. A Nashville blogger is suspending his mortgage payments. And far too many blogs have announced that they are suspending themselves.
Finally, Rocketboom's video of David Blaine's suspension over Central Park is climbing the YouTube charts. But Debateporridge gets extra points for putting together a video called Blaine on McCain, featuring a suspended Blaine being told of the candidate's suspension.
-- Maria Russo
Apotheosis of a meme? McCain's Barack Roll
To the list containing all the wondrous miracles of endless fascination, let's add the fact that John McCain's campaign team thought it would be a good idea for him to give the biggest speech of his life with a blue screen behind him--the very technology that lets anyone insert anything they want to in the background.
Cue this:
There's another attempt here, for instance ... but those are only photos. We await the next entry in the great McCain blue screen mashup of 2008. Will any comer be able to challenge the mighty Barack Roll? If you see any more entrants, please share in the comments ...
The Snowclone Awards: Googling for Cliché Memes
We at Web Scout have discovered a diverting new online pastime: Snowcloning.
Snowclones are memechés, if you will: meme-ified cliches with the operative words removed, leaving spaces for you to the masses to Mad Lib their own versions.
For instance, "X is the new Y." As Erin of the Snowclone Database pithily puts it, snowclones are like "fill in the blank headlines."
Well, there's one clever way to find out all the different original (and otherwise) ways online word smiths have filled in the snowclone over time.
Google lets you do a search like "* is the new *", where each asterisk is a blank. That search will return any phrase with "is the new" in the middle of it. So we picked a few choice snowclones and popped them into Google to see what came out. Then we chose a winner for each phrase.
If you want to see all the variations, click the linked snowclones -- you'll probably be surprised at how often people use these constructions. Odds are you've used a few yourself -- I know I have.
THE SNOWCLONE AWARDS
X is the new Y
Origin: debatable, frequently attributed to "Pink is the new black"
Winner: Vegan Is the New Atkins.
Dammit, Jim, I'm an X, not an Y
Origin: Star Trek, X = Doctor, Y = varies
Winner: Dammit Jim I'm a moron, not a scientist.
All Your X are belong to Us
Origin: viral video circa 1999, X = Base
Winner: All Your Basemnts Are Belong To Us.
Have X, will Y
Origin: Have Gun, Will Travel (1957)
Winner: Have shingle, will sue.
What happens in X, stays in X
Origin: Las Vegas, ad campaign
Winner: What happens in Davos stays in Davos.
I X, therefore, I Y
Origin: Descartes, X = think, Y = am
Winner: I think, therefore I thwim.
Toto, I have a feeling we're not in X anymore
Origin: The Wizard of Oz, X = Kansas
Winner: Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Cannes anymore.
Friends don't let friends X
Origin / 1990s PSA, X = Drive Drunk
Winner: Friends Don't Let Friends Commit War Crimes
And straight from the hotbed of meme creation, Times intern Mark Milian has brought us some of the deep Interweb's hottest snowclones ....
Obama memology 101
If you missed it last week, Gawker posted an excellent assemblage of Obama memes -- all the little ways that the Illinois senator has caught the imagination of the pop and online cultures. You've got Ernie trying to persuade Burt not to vote for Hillary, Obama as Luke versus Hillary as Darth Vader, Obama as part of a hallucinatory Indian music video, Obama Girl, and more. And these are just the best ones -- dig around a little on YouTube and you'll see a bevvy of more casual Obama riffs too (here's one daughter's "ObaMama's day" gift, a homemade Obama comic strip, and a couple of Obama baby videos, of which there are many).
