explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:1460: SMFW

2014-12-15T14:55:34Z

199.27.128.115:

Reading this is like listening to the video of that lady who imitates the sound patterns of different languages, but without actually saying any real words! --[[User:Elipongo|Elipongo]] ([[User talk:Elipongo|talk]]) 05:34, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

It would sound more natural if it were "''SMFW '''as''' an acronym almost makes sense''". Is the fact that "as" was omitted from that sentence supposed to give us a hint as to what "SMFW" might mean? [[User:Nicksh|Nicksh]] ([[User talk:Nicksh|talk]]) 07:16, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

: As "the Internet is for porn", in many contexts SFW, lit. Safe for Work, can be taken to mean sex-free content, while NSFW, Not Safe for Work, would mean sex-positive content, then SMFW might be interpreted to me SM For Work, where SM would be humorously interpreted as some graphically explicit sex-positive content, perhaps SadoMachoism, which outside of paperwork is generally classified NSFW. [[Special:Contributions/199.27.133.29|199.27.133.29]] 10:31, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

:: And "wtfw it's like smho tbfh, imdb." might be a defensive reaction to those what would not find humour of SM For Work. "what the fooking wut? It's like stick my humble opinion, to be fooking honest, in my dead body. (or database)." [[Special:Contributions/199.27.133.29|199.27.133.29]] 10:38, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

:: Additional evidence of SM For Work, would be the posture in the task chair with respect to the desk and laptop (hunched over, feet not resting on ground, etc) seems the opposite of ergonomic advice which might lead to muscle strain, pain and fatigue -- the type of unsexy, self-inflicted torments that workers do to themselves "for work"

I thought of So Much For Work as a possible meaning. {{unsigned ip|173.245.50.178}}

I think "SMFW" is a mixture of SMF and MFW: "So Much Fun When". It fits the sentence. The only thing is that Cueball doesn't look like he's having fun.

Smoke more fucking weed could be a replacement for something like "Bloody hell" or "Shit the bed".
[[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.252|141.101.98.252]] 09:05, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

So why doesn't "xkcd" appear on the acronyms list? --[[User:Koveras|Koveras]] ([[User talk:Koveras|talk]]) 09:47, 15 December 2014 (UTC)
: Because xkcd isnt an acronym. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.216.61|108.162.216.61]] 09:56, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

I would like to add STFW ("Search the fucking web", [http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/STFW]) as an acronym that SMFW is close to (same except for the second letter)...but there might be enough examples? [[User:Aquaplanet|Aquaplanet]] ([[User talk:Aquaplanet|talk]]) 11:07, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

SMFW makes perfect sense. Shaking my face when (SMH+MFW) an acronym almost makes sense.

See My Face When an acronym almost makes sense... makes perfect sense. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.99.4|141.101.99.4]] 13:26, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

"So Much Frustration When an acronym ''almost'' makes sense."

"What to feel when it's like some message has only to be f...ing hashtags, is mostly deep bafflement." [[User:Ackegard|Ackegard]] ([[User talk:Ackegard|talk]]) 14:35, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

None of these are acronyms. [[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.115|199.27.128.115]] 14:55, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

1402: Harpoons

2014-09-06T13:38:51Z

199.27.128.115: /* Explanation */ More info on this super interesting space mission yay!

{{comic
| number = 1402
| date = August 1, 2014
| title = Harpoons
| image = harpoons.png
| titletext = To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|}}
This comic is a graph of the number of {{w|harpoon}}s in space versus time. One would not expect that harpoons, which are associated with old technology, would be used in space, which is associated with high technology. Any occurrences are unexpected, and therefore interesting or funny.

The first peak states that a harpoon was in space during the {{w|Apollo 12}} mission and is associated with an incident related to rum. This implies that [http://www.harpoon-rum.eu/1.html Harpoon] brand of {{w|Rum#Regional variations|Jamaican rum}} made it aboard the Apollo 12 rocket. This is a joke, Apollo 12 carried neither harpoons nor rum.

The latter peak on this graph refers to the {{w|Rosetta (spacecraft)|Rosetta}} unmanned spacecraft. As part of its mission, it's carrying a lander (called {{w|Philae (spacecraft)|Philae}}), which has two tethers to anchor itself to the comet {{w|67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko}}. Rosetta was launched in March 2004 (as shown in the graph) and was scheduled to encounter the comet in August 2014, making this a timely comic. As of September 6th, Rosetta is maneuvering to enter orbit on September 10th. The Philae lander is scheduled to harpoon onto the comet in November 2014. The Rosetta spacecraft also carries a disk micro-etched with 13,000 pages of text in 1200 languages donated by the Long Now foundation, mentioned in previous comics.

This continues a recurring theme (as seen in comics [[111]] and [[231]]), with two unrelated but interesting objects juxtaposed graphically with humorous results.

The title text compares the Philae lander's method of deploying its tethers to whaling, in which sailors would throw harpoons at a whale with the intent of killing the whale. It was important to throw hard so the harpoon would stick in the whale so it could not get away and would tow the whaling boat until it got tired and could be killed. Thus the title text implies that the spacecraft is sentient and needs a motivation to fire the harpoons hard enough to stay anchored to the comet; to this end it has been programmed to believe that its mission is to kill the comet.

==Transcript==
:'''Number of harpoons in space'''
:by year
:[A chart with a red graph is drawn below]
:[The y-axis]
:0 1 2 3
:[The x-axis]
:1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020
:[The graph is at zero until a sharp peak to 1 in 1970. The peak is labeled]
:Apollo 12 rum incident
:[The graph then stays at 0 until 2004. Then it rises to 2 and stays there until today, continuing as a dotted line after 2014. The rise is labeled]
:Rosetta comet mission launched carrying lander with harpoon tethers

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Charts]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]

1371: Brightness

2014-05-21T07:16:55Z

199.27.128.115:

{{comic
| number = 1371
| date = May 21, 2014
| title = Brightness
| image = brightness.png
| titletext = Recently, some exoplanet astronomers have managed to use careful analysis of reflected light to discover Earth during the day.
}}

==Explanation==
Exoplanets are planets outside of our solar system, and exoplanet astronomers are astronomers who attempt to discover and study such planets. One method of discovering exoplanets is detecting fluctuations in a star's brightness over time. Such fluctuations could be caused by a planet's orbit around the star, partially blocking the light that reaches an observer on Earth. In the comic, the exoplanet astronomer is trying to observe the sun through the ground at night, observing that it has decreased in brightness compared to daytime (which it has by 100%). She then rightfully concludes that the star is orbited by at least one planet (the Earth), which is of course true.

The title text refers to another method of discovering exoplanets by detecting light reflected off of them from nearby stars. Observing the light that reflects off of the Earth is in fact how was see everything around us, so one hardly needs to be an exoplanet astronomer to discover the Earth in this way.

==Transcript==
:[Megan is standing on a black (night-time) background, staring at the ground.]
:Megan: Based on this decrease in the star's brightness, I believe it is orbited by at least one planet.

:Exoplanet Astronomers At Night

{{comic discussion}}

User talk:TobyBartels

2014-04-07T06:47:14Z

199.27.128.115: One last thing

This is far too brilliant. Are you there?

955: Neutrinos

2014-04-02T01:29:42Z

199.27.128.115: /* Explanation */ wikilink Wikipedia article covering the issue/retraction

{{comic
| number = 955
| date = September 23, 2011
| title = Neutrinos
| image = neutrinos.png
| titletext = I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).
}}

==Explanation==
The "{{w|Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly|Neutrino exceed the speed of light}} issue" [http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20110594-264/physics-shocker-neutrinos-clocked-faster-than-light/ was an actual story] from the day before the comic was posted. An experiment at {{w|CERN}} caused a stream of neutrinos to be passed from CERN in Switzerland to a receiving station at the INFN laboratories of Gran Sasso in Italy ({{w|LNGS}}). The initial findings from the experiment were that the neutrinos arrived at the detector in less time than a beam of light would have taken. The neutrinos had apparently exceeded the {{w|speed of light}}.

{{w|Albert Einstein}} famously posited that the speed of light in a vacuum is both constant and absolutely the fastest possible speed in the universe. Nothing can go faster. Therefore, a report that neutrinos have been found travelling faster than light challenges a fundamental law of physics and turns all of physics, or at least {{w|special relativity}} on its head.

[[386|Prior experience]] has shown [[Cueball]] that in such cases, arguing with people and preaching caution is futile. Cueball realizes that it is more satisfying and profitable to place bets with them instead. His reasoning is that almost invariably, these supposedly world-changing discoveries end up falling apart after further investigation, and that if it doesn't, he wouldn't care.

The title text is a reference to a graph published similar to, if not the same as, the one found [http://indianysn.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/cern-opera-graph.jpg here]. The continental drift can be seen, as well as the clearly marked jump showing the earthquake in question.

Postscript: Cueball (that is, Randall) was correct. The experiment was found to be flawed. [http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112551696/cern-confirms-neutrinos-not-faster-than-light/ Neutrinos are not faster than light], the data was probably wrong due to an incorrectly synchronized clock, or caused by some broken wiring on the receiving end.

==Transcript==
:[Megan and Cueball are talking.]
:Megan: Did you see the neutrino speed of light thing?
:Cueball: Yup! Good news; I need the cash.
:Megan: Huh? Cash?

:[Text above half-sized panel.]
:Yeah. When there's a news story about a study overturning all of physics, I used to urge caution, remind people that experts aren't all stupid, and end up in pointless arguments about Galileo.

:[Half-height panel.]
:[Cueball sitting on chair, looking down at laptop in his lap. Books and things are on a desk in front of him.]
:Cueball: No, this isn't ''about'' whether relativity exists. If it didn't, your GPS wouldn't work.
:Cueball: What do you mean, "science thought police"? Have you seen our budget? We couldn't ''begin'' to afford our own thought police.

:[Megan and Cueball talking again.]
:Megan: That sounds miserable and unfulfilling.
:Cueball: Yup. So I gave up, and now I just find excited believers and bet them $200 each that the new result won't pan out.

:[Same as last panel.]
:Megan: That's mean.
:Cueball: It provides a good income, and if I'm ever wrong, I'll be too excited about the new physics to notice the loss.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

955: Neutrinos

2014-04-02T01:13:00Z

199.27.128.115: /* Explanation */ Changed img src to one that actually works (hey, duty called)

{{comic
| number = 955
| date = September 23, 2011
| title = Neutrinos
| image = neutrinos.png
| titletext = I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).
}}

==Explanation==
The "Neutrino exceed the speed of light issue" [http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20110594-264/physics-shocker-neutrinos-clocked-faster-than-light/ was an actual story] from the day before the comic was posted. An experiment at {{w|CERN}} caused a stream of neutrinos to be passed from CERN in Switzerland to a receiving station at the INFN laboratories of Gran Sasso in Italy ({{w|LNGS}}). The initial findings from the experiment were that the neutrinos arrived at the detector in less time than a beam of light would have taken. The neutrinos had apparently exceeded the {{w|speed of light}}.

{{w|Albert Einstein}} famously posited that the speed of light in a vacuum is both constant and absolutely the fastest possible speed in the universe. Nothing can go faster. Therefore, a report that neutrinos have been found travelling faster than light challenges a fundamental law of physics and turns all of physics, or at least {{w|special relativity}} on its head.

[[386|Prior experience]] has shown [[Cueball]] that in such cases, arguing with people and preaching caution is futile. Cueball realizes that it is more satisfying and profitable to place bets with them instead. His reasoning is that almost invariably, these supposedly world-changing discoveries end up falling apart after further investigation, and that if it doesn't, he wouldn't care.

The title text is a reference to a graph published similar to, if not the same as, the one found [http://indianysn.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/cern-opera-graph.jpg here]. The continental drift can be seen, as well as the clearly marked jump showing the earthquake in question.

Postscript: Cueball (that is, Randall) was correct. The experiment was found to be flawed. [http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112551696/cern-confirms-neutrinos-not-faster-than-light/ Neutrinos are not faster than light], the data was probably wrong due to an incorrectly synchronized clock, or caused by some broken wiring on the receiving end.

==Transcript==
:[Megan and Cueball are talking.]
:Megan: Did you see the neutrino speed of light thing?
:Cueball: Yup! Good news; I need the cash.
:Megan: Huh? Cash?

:[Text above half-sized panel.]
:Yeah. When there's a news story about a study overturning all of physics, I used to urge caution, remind people that experts aren't all stupid, and end up in pointless arguments about Galileo.

:[Half-height panel.]
:[Cueball sitting on chair, looking down at laptop in his lap. Books and things are on a desk in front of him.]
:Cueball: No, this isn't ''about'' whether relativity exists. If it didn't, your GPS wouldn't work.
:Cueball: What do you mean, "science thought police"? Have you seen our budget? We couldn't ''begin'' to afford our own thought police.

:[Megan and Cueball talking again.]
:Megan: That sounds miserable and unfulfilling.
:Cueball: Yup. So I gave up, and now I just find excited believers and bet them $200 each that the new result won't pan out.

:[Same as last panel.]
:Megan: That's mean.
:Cueball: It provides a good income, and if I'm ever wrong, I'll be too excited about the new physics to notice the loss.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

778: Scheduling

2014-02-04T01:16:30Z

199.27.128.115: /* Explanation */ reworded some stuff

{{comic
| number = 778
| date = August 11, 2010
| title = Scheduling
| image = scheduling.png
| titletext = 'How about a little ... *family growth*?' 'Dude, that's not until round two.'
}}

==Explanation==

This comic is a take on the common plots of pornographic movies. There are several "stereotypical" setups for porn videoes - the suggestive pizza deliveryman ("hot sausage" being a suggestive pun), the French maid who finds out her master is home early and the wife is still away, and the plumber who, while performing routine repairs on a woman's house, becomes enamored with her. In all cases it is usually a simple plot in order to set up a scenario for the pornography. In this comic, all three of these common stereotypical plots seem to have occurred at once. Realizing that none of their intended targets for sex (ostensibly members of the Jones family) are at home, and thus they are all in the house alone with nothing to do, one of them grabs a game of {{w|Agricola (board game)}} off of the shelf, and they sit down to play, their confusion about this mixing of scenarios forgotten. Then the Joneses come home and are baffled by the assemblage of random professionals playing Agricola on their floor.

Agricola's objective is to build a stable family farm, contrasting with the apparently dysfunctional family in the comic.

The title text references "family growth", which could be interpreted as a cheesy euphemism for sex (in the porn-movie-plot context) or as a game mechanic for gaining another worker (in the Agricola-game context). The "not until round two" response could be used for either interpretation.

==Transcript==
:[Pizza guy enters through door; maid is dusting.]
:Pizza Guy: Pizza delivery! Did someone order a ''hot sausag''-
:Maid: Mon dieu! Monsieur is home early-
:Both: Wait, who are ''you''?

:Pizza guy: Wait, this is the Jones', right? Their daughter was supposed to be having a party!
:Maid: No, I thought Mr. Jones was coming home early.

:[Pizza guy is off-panel left as plumber enters from the right.]
:Pizza guy: But I thought-
:Plumber: Howdy, Mrs. Jones. I hear you need some ''plumbi''-
:Plumber: Who are you?i

:[The pizza guy looks in a cabinet; the others are off-panel right.]
:Maid: Sorry, big mixup.
:Pizza guy: Hey, check out out-the Joneses have ''Agricola''!
:Plumber: I love that game!

:[Mr. Jones and Miss Jones arrive home. Pizza guy, maid, and plumber are sitting on the floor playing Agricola.]
:Mr. Jones: What in the name of...
:Pizza guy: Dammit, ''I'' wanted that grain.
:Maid: Hush, you have starting player.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Sex]]

26: Fourier

2014-01-31T01:16:37Z

199.27.128.115: /* Explanation */ a bit more explanation on the transform

{{comic
| number = 26
| date = November 2, 2005
| title = Fourier
| image = fourier.jpg
| titletext = That cat has some serious periodic components
}}

==Explanation==
A {{w|Fourier transform}} is a mathematical function often used in physics and engineering.

The theory is that any line graph can be represented as the sum of a bunch of sine waves of different frequencies, with each frequency having a different amplitude. (The most obvious application is in analysing a sound recording in terms of the different frequencies of sounds used.) So, for any line graph you can produce another graph of the frequencies and their amplitudes. To do this, there is a function where you put in one graph and you get the second graph as output, and this process of going from one to the other is a "transform". This function is actually shown in the third line of the comic [[55: Useless]].

Unfortunately Cueball has applied this "transform" to his cat. Although it seems to still be alive and possibly even unharmed, it is clearly not in its familiar shape, and it is not clear if this condition is permanent or not.

"Periodic components" in the title text refers to the spikes in the graph. Because sine waves repeat themselves as you go along, the presence of large amounts of one particular sine wave in the Fourier transform graph (each spike) shows that the overall result (the initial graph) is likely to have parts that also repeat themselves, like a {{w|periodic function}}. In other words, the cat has repeating parts.

==Transcript==
:[Cueball talks on phone. Cat with many sharp points looks on.]
:Cueball: Hi, Dr. Elizabeth? Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat...
:Cat: Meow!

==Trivia==
*Original comments from [[Randall]]: "I like the idea of a graph meowing. Also, that cat has a lot of periodic components."
*This is the twenty-seventh comic originally posted to livejournal. The previous was [[25: Barrel - Part 4]]. The next was [[27: Meat Cereals]].

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics posted on livejournal]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Math]]

256: Online Communities

2013-12-22T08:58:54Z

199.27.128.115: /* Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions) */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not every site and meme has an explanation; Transcript needs checked for completeness and cleaned up. One label unreadable, but may be obvious to someone who knows blogs well. Large version of comic unlinked.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time.''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like.
* ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''Classmates.com'', ''Reunion.com'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites.
* ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)
===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''E-Harmony'' and ''OkCupid'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.
* ''Classmates.com'' is a services in which the user can meet fellow classmates that came from the same high school. The website is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??" (Incidentally, there is more to the coupled picture than what the advertisement says.)
* ''Reunion.com'' is/was one of Classmates.com's competitors.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''Myspace'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''Facebook'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''Orkut'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''Xanga'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''LJ'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''Blurty'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is according to Wikipedia an 18+ general community using this software.

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'':
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'':
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''Point South of Technorati'': Can't read it
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'': YouTube is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'':
* ''Broadcaster'':
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''LastFM'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''DeviantArt'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Reddit'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''Digg'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''Fark'':
* ''Something Awful'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' (Slashdot):
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon'':
* ''Del.icio.us'':

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest. Geographic area represents estimated size of membership Map Disclaimer Text: Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Illegible label south of Technocrati],
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:XY Singles,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2013-12-22T08:57:11Z

199.27.128.115: /* Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East) */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not every site and meme has an explanation; Transcript needs checked for completeness and cleaned up. One label unreadable, but may be obvious to someone who knows blogs well. Large version of comic unlinked.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time.''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like.
* ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''Classmates.com'', ''Reunion.com'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites.
* ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)
===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''E-Harmony'' and ''OkCupid'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.
* ''Classmates.com'' is a services in which the user can meet fellow classmates that came from the same high school. The website is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??" (Incidentally, there is more to the coupled picture than what the advertisement says.)

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''Myspace'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''Facebook'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''Orkut'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''Xanga'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''LJ'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''Blurty'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is according to Wikipedia an 18+ general community using this software.

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'':
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'':
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''Point South of Technorati'': Can't read it
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'': YouTube is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'':
* ''Broadcaster'':
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''LastFM'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''DeviantArt'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'': a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'': an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Reddit'': the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
* ''Digg'': a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but has been sold since this map was drawn and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
* ''Fark'':
* ''Something Awful'': a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of Dangan Ronpa and Super Dangan Ronpa 2, which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
* ''/.'' (Slashdot):
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon'':
* ''Del.icio.us'':

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest. Geographic area represents estimated size of membership Map Disclaimer Text: Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Illegible label south of Technocrati],
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:XY Singles,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2013-12-22T08:54:30Z

199.27.128.115: /* Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions) */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not every site and meme has an explanation; Transcript needs checked for completeness and cleaned up. One label unreadable, but may be obvious to someone who knows blogs well. Large version of comic unlinked.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time.''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like.
* ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''Classmates.com'', ''Reunion.com'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites.
* ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)
===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''E-Harmony'' and ''OkCupid'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.
* ''Classmates.com'' is a services in which the user can meet fellow classmates that came from the same high school. The website is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??" (Incidentally, there is more to the coupled picture than what the advertisement says.)

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''Myspace'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''Facebook'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''Orkut'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''Xanga'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''LJ'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''Blurty'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is according to Wikipedia an 18+ general community using this software.

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'':
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'':
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''Point South of Technorati'': Can't read it
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'': YouTube is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'':
* ''Broadcaster'':
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''LastFM'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''DeviantArt'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'' is a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'' is an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Digg'':
* ''Fark'':
* ''Reddit''
* ''Something Awful''
* ''/.'' (Slashdot):
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon''
* ''Del.icio.us''

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest. Geographic area represents estimated size of membership Map Disclaimer Text: Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Illegible label south of Technocrati],
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:XY Singles,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2013-12-22T08:29:15Z

199.27.128.115: /* Sea of Culture (Central region) */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not every site and meme has an explanation; Transcript needs checked for completeness and cleaned up. One label unreadable, but may be obvious to someone who knows blogs well. Large version of comic unlinked.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time.''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like.
* ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''Classmates.com'', ''Reunion.com'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites.
* ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)
===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''E-Harmony'' and ''OkCupid'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''Myspace'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''Facebook'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''Orkut'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''Xanga'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''LJ'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''Blurty'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is according to Wikipedia an 18+ general community using this software.

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'':
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'':
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''Point South of Technorati'': Can't read it
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'': YouTube is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google has since purchased YouTube.
* ''Piczo'':
* ''Broadcaster'':
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'': a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
* ''LastFM'': a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
* ''DeviantArt'': the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'' is a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'' is an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Digg'':
* ''Fark'':
* ''Reddit''
* ''Something Awful''
* ''/.'' (Slashdot):
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon''
* ''Del.icio.us''

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest. Geographic area represents estimated size of membership Map Disclaimer Text: Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Illegible label south of Technocrati],
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:XY Singles,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

256: Online Communities

2013-12-22T08:22:00Z

199.27.128.115: /* Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East) */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not every site and meme has an explanation; Transcript needs checked for completeness and cleaned up. One label unreadable, but may be obvious to someone who knows blogs well. Large version of comic unlinked.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time.''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like.
* ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''Classmates.com'', ''Reunion.com'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites.
* ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)
===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''E-Harmony'' and ''OkCupid'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''Myspace'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''Facebook'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''Orkut'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''Xanga'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''LJ'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''Blurty'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is according to Wikipedia an 18+ general community using this software.

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'':
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'':
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''Point South of Technorati'': Can't read it
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'':
* ''Piczo'':
* ''Broadcaster'':
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'':
* ''LastFM'':
* ''DeviantArt'':

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'' is a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'' is an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Digg'':
* ''Fark'':
* ''Reddit''
* ''Something Awful''
* ''/.'' (Slashdot):
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon''
* ''Del.icio.us''

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': A reference to the viral video "Numa Numa", consisting to a fat guy dancing and lip-syncing to the song "Dragostea din tei" (Romanian for "Love from the lindens").
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest. Geographic area represents estimated size of membership Map Disclaimer Text: Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Illegible label south of Technocrati],
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:XY Singles,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

802: Online Communities 2

2013-12-22T08:19:14Z

199.27.128.115: /* Troll Bay and the Sea of Memes */

{{comic
| number = 802
| date = October 6, 2010
| title = Online Communities 2
| image = online_communities_2.png
| titletext = Best trivia I learned while working on this: 'Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD?' Then you wait for the listener to do a double-take.
}}
A larger version of this picture can be found here: [http://xkcd.com/802_large/ http://xkcd.com/802_large/].
<div class="toclimit-3" style="float:right; margin-left: 10px;"> __TOC__ </div>
==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not all of the regions are fully explained.}}
This comic shows a map of internet communities where the size of each region roughly corresponds to its size, and its proximity to other regions indicates similarities.

This is the successor of [[256: Online Communities]]. It differs in that it is updated, and furthermore, instead of using the ''membership'' of whichever service to determine its size on the map, it uses its "daily social activity."

The map actually has two super−maps: the online community map is surrounded by the "countries" of E−Mail and SMS ("Instant Messaging"). These, in turn, are surrounded by the "Spoken Language" country (which is odd, considering that e−mail, SMS, and the Internet in general are based on ''written'' language) with its own sub−country, "cell phones" (which ''do'' involve e−mail and the Internet while being the mean medium of SMS's).

At the title text [[Randall]] explains that, using his definition of "most activity per day", Farmville is actually the ''second'' most popular "Facebook farming game". This will strike many as odd, because Farmville is by far the most famous, leading one to wonder how the most famous could not be the most played. The phrase "browser-based social-networking-centered farming game" is an example of [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverlyNarrowSuperlative an overly-narrow superlative].

==Facebook Region==
The Facebook region deals with social networks, that is, websites oriented towards having people meet.

'''{{w|Facebook}}''' is a social networking site that allows people to meet old real−life friends and make new friends that share similar interests. One of its most notable features is that a member can update a "status" or make normal posts about the happenings of the member's life, complete with pictures, other members "liking" these posts. The size of the Facebook region is not exaggerated; most websites seem to allow "liking" their content or allow/require logging in the website with a Facebook account. There even are cell phones with a "Facebook" button!

'''Farmville''', '''Happy Farm''', and '''Farm Town''' are all Facebook games. The "Unethical Bay" refers to how these games tend to addict players into constantly buying virtual items of questionable value.

The '''People You Can't Unfriend''' refer to people whom, due to real-life expectations and relationships, unfriending them is difficult, no matter how you really feel about them.

The '''Data Mines''' refer to the data mining that Facebook does with the interests of its members. This fuels the profitable advertising business at the expense of customer trust.

The '''Plains of Awkwardly Public Family Interactions''' refer to how interactions with family members on Facebook suddenly become more awkward because everyone on Facebook (and sometimes ''off'' Facebook, given that you do not necessarily need to log in if you want to see someone's Facebook account) if you are discussing with your family through post comments.

'''"Old Facebook" Resistance''' refers to Facebook's earlier users, who have often resisted (and resented) changes made to Facebook as it became more popular.

'''Privacy Controls''' is located on the map surrounded by a Lava Pool, which is a reference to how difficult it is to find the privacy controls within Facebook.

While Facebook is the largest "country" of the Facebook Region, there are a lot of smaller "countries" that represent smaller social networks.

*Below Facebook (and "'Old Facebook' Resistance") is '''{{w|Diaspora (social network)|Diaspora}}''', a fully open-source, decentralized, privacy-respecting-and-expecting alternative to Facebook. From what this map tells, Diaspora is little-known, even if Facebook is taken out of the context.
*'''{{w|Taringa!}}''' is a Spanish-speaking social network that is based on a forums. Copyrighted material is frequently found there.
*'''{{w|Classmates.com}}''' is a services in which the user can meet fellow classmates that came from the same high school. The website is probably best-known by its memetic advertisement that said [http://dudemanphat.blogspot.com/2005/10/how-am-i-supposed-to-care-about-nick.html "She married him??!! And they've got 7 kids??"] (Incidentally, [http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2003325519_adcouple27.html there is more to the coupled picture than what the advertisement says.])
*'''{{w|MySpace}}''' is a social networking website that is a kind of proto-Facebook: users could customize their one-page websites with whatever they wanted, make their interests and daily lives public, and interact with other users. Back in the mid 2000's, MySpace was the largest social network, many people using the website; however, the surprisingly-less-customizable Facebook ended up taking the place of MySpace. The "bands" country of MySpace refers to how a lot of bands in the day advertised and interacted using the website. Indeed, the latest incarnation of MySpace (in terms of 2013) is more oriented towards band members.
*'''{{w|LinkedIn}}''' is a social network aimed towards people in the workplace.
*'''{{w|Orkut}}''' is one of Google's first social networks before Google made [https://plus.google.com/ Google+].
*'''{{w|Hi5}}''' is a social network that is very popular among people in Latin America.
*'''{{w|Renren}}''' ('''「人人」''', "people" in Chinese) is "a Chinese copy of Facebook."

Other areas of note are the '''Niche Market Mountains''', where social networks aimed towards more niche markets are located. Similar to how mountains tend to be isolated from mainland, niche social networks tend to be just that: niche, without much interaction with the general populace. Above the Niche Market Mountains are the '''Charred Wasteland of Abandoned Social Networks'''. Given the popularity of MySpace and Facebook, there would be no doubt tons of websites wanting to take advantage of the success of these websites or even wanting to compete or even overpower with them. Even so, these websites tend to not have the userbase or even the expertise towards the long-term, hence they become wastelands: environments devoid of life, except the few life forms that are from these wastelands (in this case, the ones who are loyal to the website or which are sadly few). Within the '''Charred Wasteland of Abandoned Social Networks''' stands [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias Ozymandias], the titular broken statue of Shelley's poem. In the poem, only "two vast and trunkless legs of stone" and a "shattered visage" are all that remain of the once-great statue and both of these features are present in the comic.

Also visible are the '''Duckface Mountains''', the '''Red Cup Mountains''', and '''Buzzword Bay'''. "Duckface" refers to [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/duck-face this incredibly obnoxious facial expression], and "red cup pictures" are any pictures containing party-goers holding disposable red plastic beverage cups. Facebook is absolutely flooded with both types of pictures. {{w|Buzzword}}s are words and phrases that make you sound a lot more topical than you actually are, used to garner attention; again, Facebook status updates are commonly filled with buzzwords.

==MMO Isle==
MMO's (short form of "MMORPG", short form of "Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Player Game") are websites that host online games where multiple people take the role of a character and play in a setting hosted by the website. These types of games tend to be fantastical in setting. Frequently, missions are added to the game, giving current player more incentive towards playing more.

*'''[https://www.habbo.com/ Habbo Hotel]''' is a website where someone creates a human avatar an interacts in a virtual world that is not that different from the one in real life.
*'''[http://www.clubpenguin.com/ Club Penguin]''' is [http://disney.com/ Disney's] MMO where someone creates a penguin avatar and interacts with other in a more polar, cartoony setting. Club Penguin is aimed towards children.
*'''[http://maplestory.nexon.net/ Maple Story]''' is an MMO that has a more natural setting. The most distinguishing feature of Maple Story is its cartoony pixel art.
*'''[http://www.gamefaqs.com/ GameFAQs]''', while not an MMO, is a website that has the largest repository of walkthoughs, that is, guides that help someone beat a game. GameFAQs is notable for not only its large repository of walkthroughs of games that are across an extreme variety of consoles, handhelds, and even computers (not all of them MMOs), but also the drama that is rumoured to happen in the GameFAQs forums.
*'''[http://www.ign.com/ IGN]''' (full: '''Imagine Games Network'''), while also not an MMO, is the largest website that gives news on video games in general, not just MMOs. Each of the games mentioned in the site have pages that have summaries, reviews, screenshots, other art, videos, and links to news related to its games.
*'''[http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/index.shtml FFXI]''' (full: '''Final Fantasy XI''') is an MMO from SquareEnix, being the first MMO of the popular ''Final Fantasy'' series.
*'''[http://www.runescape.com/community Runescape]''' is an older MMO.
*'''[http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/ Starcraft II]''' is a realtime strategy game with a science fiction setting that heavily involves space travel. While technically not an MMO, it has a significant online multiplayer component.
*'''[http://us.battle.net/wow/en/ WoW]''' (full: '''World of Warcraft''') is the definitive MMO, being not only the most popular and one of the longest-running but also the most expansive (having its own spinoff games, comic books, novels, and even figurines), WOW giving the idea of how an MMO should be. A player can choose from a variety of races, each with its own heavy history.
*'''[http://secondlife.com/ Second Life]''' is similar to Habbo, albeit with a bigger suspension of disbelief (one example being that the player does not need to be a human) and in a 3D setting.
*'''[http://www.nationstates.net/ NationStates]''' is a text-based political simulation game. Notably, some of its traffic comes not from the actual game (which is optional), but the extensive set of political, roleplaying, and general forums attached.
*'''[http://www.eveonline.com/ Eve Online]''' is a science fiction MMO which is notable because of its virtual economy.
*'''[http://www.gaiaonline.com/ Gaia]''' (full: '''Gaia Online'''), while not an MMO, is a forums oriented towards pop culture, including video games and Japanese media. Its most notable feature is the heavy customization possible of a member's pixel-art avatar. Its members tend to roleplay a lot, albeit in a more written, story-based form. Gaia has gained a revaination of its members stealing art and causing drama.

Other notable regions include:
*The '''Mountains of Steam''', referring to the game distribution service [http://store.steampowered.com/ Steam] where people could buy and download video games in general, not just MMOs.
*'''River Grind''' refers to "grinding." In most MMOs, the character is a fighter of some sorts, yet starts at a level 1, signifying the character's aptitude level in combat. The character can level up and gain more aptitude levels through earning experience, of which the most reliable and otherwise common way is the process of "grinding," that is, repeatedly fighting opposing monsters (sometimes of a level notably lower that your character's), gaining experience points from winning these battles until your character gains a level, that is, "levels up". While a practical necessity in strengthening the character, this process can be tiresome, hence the expression "grinding."
*'''Spawn Camp''' refers to "spawn points", the places in combat-oriented MMO's tend to produce ("spawn") random AI-powered creatures, and the act of "spawn camping", in which the player character simply stands behind or around the spawn points to fight the enemy creatures as soon as they appear.
*'''Gulf of Lag''' refers to how the MMO can be slowed down a considerable amount due to the large amount of players simultaneously using the same server, this congestion bogging down the server and frustrating the users.
*'''[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/final-boss-of-the-internet End Guy for the Internet]''' refers to "end bosses", the last -- and usually hardest to defeat -- "bad guy" in a game (or a section of a game).

==YouTube Region==
The YouTube region refers to websites that are based on user-created content.

'''[https://www.youtube.com/ YouTube]''' is the definitive video website where people can upload videos with the purpose of public viewing, ranging from home movies through official music videos through Let's Plays of people playing video games to questionably-legal uploads of cartoons and films. Google had purchased YouTube.

Many of the sites on the map are just references to {{w|viral video}}s at {{w|YouTube}}:
*'''Viral Shores''' refers to how viral videos (whether they be viral marketing or simply memes) tend to proliferate on YouTube.
*'''Britney''' likely refers to pop singer {{w|Britney Spears}} and the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc‎ "Leave Britney Alone" guy].
*'''Maru Gulf''' refers to Maru the Cat, a YouTube celebrity [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/676:_Abstraction also mentioned in xkcd].
*'''Prairie Dog Habitat''' likely refers to the viral video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Y73sPHKxw Dramatic Chipmunk] (which is actually a Prairie Dog).
*'''Rick Rolling Hills''' references, well, {{w|Rickrolling}}. More information [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ here]. The "deserted" note likely refers to how Rick Astley himself is tired of the meme, or again, how people tend to leave the video upon getting "Rick Roll'd," never actually going to the video with the express purpose of viewing the video.
*'''Lunar Landing Soundstage''' is, of course, a reference to the {{w|Moon landing conspiracy theories}}, which Randall has railed on before.
*'''{{w|OK Go}} Bay''' refers to the band "OK Go" who have multiple viral music videos on YouTube, most famously [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA "Here it goes again"] featuring treadmills.

The '''HTML5 swamp''' refers to the spotty support of HTML 5 (an update on HTML that is frequently touting its media capabilities, making HTML 5 a viable alternative to Flash) YouTube has. Of course, by the time the comic was written, HTML 5 was still in its infancy. The Music Video Bay refers to the amount of music videos (official or otherwise) are present in YouTube.

Other counties of the YouTube region include:
*'''[https://secure.flickr.com/ Flickr]''', a website where people can upload and share photographs they took.
*'''[http://fotolog.com Fotolog]''', a photo website very popular in South America in 2004-2008, which was used as a social network.
*'''[https://vimeo.com/ vimeo]''', a website where people tend to showcase artistic content that they made on their own, notably independent studios.
*'''[http://www.last.fm/ Last.fm]''', a music website that is notable of its "scrobbling" feature.
*'''[https://www.newgrounds.com/ Newgrounds]''', a website that hosts art, (Flash-based) videos, audio, and (Flash-based) games to which other users can comment and rate. Even so, content from Newgrounds tends to be obscene, though there is a filtering system if a viewer does not wish to see obscene content.
*'''[http://www.deviantart.com/ deviantArt]''', the largest art website, where people can upload, sell, and buy not only art itself, but also video, audio, Flash-work, and even skins (the original purpose of deviantArt). While many big-name/professional people and organizations have their works in deviantArt, the site is more infamous for the large amount of people who upload low-quality fan-art and fan-characters, most notably of media from Japan. Another point of infamy is the large amount of drama that can happen in the website.
*'''[http://www.chatroulette.com/ Chatroulette]''' is a website where people are randomly paired up with each other and video/text chat.
*'''[https://tumblr.com/ Tumblr]''', where people could make a blog and post text, pictures, video, audio, quotes, and links. The most distinguishing feature is the ability to "reblog" these posts from other's people's blogs into the user's own blog. Notable features of Tumblr include sketchblogs (where people upload their sketches), Ask blogs (where people answer questions other users ask, the moderators of these blogs usually pretending to be a character from a form of media), and the large amount of "social justice" (where people fight against racism, sexism, and other forms of negative discrimination). (See also [[1043: Ablogalypse]].)

The '''Isle of teenagers who just discovered macroeconomics''' is a joke about how teenagers tend to think that the world and the economy are a lot simpler than they actually are. Combined with the typical internet mindset, this leads to a lot of teenagers posting blogs and videos and comments on blogs and videos describing how idiotic the government and other red-tape-related adults are.
The '''Snob Sound''' could refer to the large amount of people who look down on others in the surrounding websites (one example being an original artist looking down on people who draw mainly fan-art).

==Twitter Region==
*'''Bieber Bay''' is a reference to {{w|Justin Bieber}} a pop singer whose singing sprouted on YouTube and became very popular on Twitter and other social media. He is very much vilified because of his rather feminine appearance and his hordes of fans (called "Beliebers") that seem to support him to ridiculous extents. Lately, though, Justin Beiber has taken a "bad boy" attitude because of all the Beliebers who are willing to defend him no matter what, him partaking in a lot of questionable activities that include tattoos, questionably-legal substances, and buying prostitution, thus lowering his popularity in the general populace.
*'''{{w|Google Buzz}}''' is a former social network attempted by Google. It has since been shut down.
*'''Bit.Ly Mountains''' is a reference to the URL shortening service {{w|bit.ly}}.
*'''Kayne's Isle of Sadness''' is a reference to the musician {{w|Kayne West}}.
*'''Sarah Palin USA''' is the Twitter handle of former politician {{w|Sarah Palin}}.
*'''Clueless Politician Coast''' is a reference to the number of politicians on Twitter and other social networks who repeatedly share clueless updates that more often create an uproar than help their election chances.
*'''Desert of Food Updates''' is a reference to the number of pictures of food that are shared on social media (especially Twitter). There has even been some controversy on posting such pictures.
*'''Journalists Trying to Find the Cutting Edge''' is referencing journalists on Twitter trying to keep up with the way that news is gathered and delivered now, despite usually working for a newspaper that publishes once a day.
*'''{{w|SHAQ}}''' is a reference to the former NBA basketball player, {{w|Shaq}}.
*'''{{w|identi.ca}}''' is an open source social networking and micro-blogging service, being an alternative to Twitter.
*''' Breaking! Waves''' is a pun on the fact that so many people used the word "Breaking" at the beginning of tweets that do not warrant that tag that the word has lost most of its meaning and become a joke. It is a pun because waves "break" on the shore.
*'''Web 3.0''' refers to the unofficial term {{w|Web 2.0}}. In this case, "Web 1.0" refers to accessing the Internet using Web Browsers, e-mail, and chatting, mainly through the use of computers. "Web 2.0" refers to accessing the Internet through new means (for example, RSS Feeds that read the news) through more devices (for example: tablets and cell phones). As such, "Web 3.0" means either what the Internet is like now in its current state of development, or what it will soon develop into; either way, it is still very much Under Construction.

==Geotagged Bay==
*'''{{w|Yelp}}''' is a website where people post reviews of real-life public locations (one example being restaurants).
*'''{{w|Geocaching}}'''
*'''{{w|Foursquare}}''' is a location-based social network.
*'''Latitude''' refers to {{w|Google Latitude}}

==Troll Bay and the Sea of Memes==
*'''Reddit''' - {{w|Reddit}} is the self-described "front page of the Internet" in which users submit stories, photos and videos and the best are "up-voted" to the top of the page.
*'''Wikipedia talk pages'''
*'''{{w|Wikia}}''' is a 3rd party wiki software.
*'''StumbleUpon'''
*'''Delicious'''
*'''{{w|Digg}}''' is a former competitor to Reddit in the social-news sphere, but now has been sold and restarted as a aggregator of news stories.
*'''Slashdot''', labeled "/." on the map,
*'''Fark'''
*'''YTMND''' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
*'''IRC isles'''

==Skype Region==
The Skype Region refers to different IM, or Instant Messaging services, that enable almost-real-time text chatting between multiple people. These often allow services like voice chat and even video calls.

*'''[http://xkcd.com/ xkcd]''' is "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language." The comics are stick figures that talk about technological things, bigger philosophies, or simply events in the author's life. More information about the webcomic can be found [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/xkcd here].
*'''{{w|Skype}}''' is, according to Randall, the most popular of these among the internet. It has many features to allow peer-to-peer voice chats, as well as allowing calls to be made at a price to actual phones.

==Blogosphere==

==Blogosphere (Core Region)==
Gossip Blogs:
*Jezebel
*Deadline
*TMZ
*Gawker
*LJ Oh No They Didn't
*Doucheblog
*Isle of Mockery

Liberal Blogs:
*Huffington Post
*Paul Krugman
*Daily Beast
*TPM
*Ezra Klein
*Think Progress
*Kos

Bay of Flame:
*Politics Daily
*CNN Political Ticker
*Mediaite
*NY Times
*The Talk
*Libertarian Isle

Conservative Blogs:
*Pajamas Media
*Michelle Malkin
*Hot Air
*Red State
*American Thinker
*John Mall(?)

Tech Blogs:
*Boy Genius Report
*Gizmodo
*Engadget
*Crunchgear
*Techcrunch
*Joystiq
*Kotaku

Assorted:
*BoingBoing
*Lifehacker
*Deadspin
*Meatorama

==QQ Region==
*'''Baidu Baike''' (「百度百科」, "Baidu Encyclopedia") is a Chinese search engine.
* The '''Ma Le Ge Bi''' and the '''Grass Mud Horse Bay''' could refer to the {{w|Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures}}.
*'''{{w|Tencent QQ}}''' is a Chinese instant messaging program.
*In English communities "QQ" has several more common definitions:
**An {{w|emoticon}}, representing a face with two large, crying eyes.
**A synonym for "rage quit", in which a video game player quits the game out of sheer frustration. It originated in ''Warcraft II'' multiplayer, where pressing Ctrl+Q+Q would quit the game, and became more widely known in ''World of Warcraft''.
**These definitions are commonly combined, usually to mock the "rage quitter".
*The Gulf of China refers to how sites in the region are based in People's Republic of China ("Red China"). The '''Great Firewall''' refers to {{w|The Great Firewall of China}}, a pun on {{w|The Great Wall of China}}. Similar to how The Great Wall of China was meant to keep intruding nations out of the then-capital of the city, The Great Firewall of China is meant to keep visitors from visiting censored websites. However, either a VPN or remote access to a computer in a "freer" country can circumvent the Firewall.

==Forums Islands==
Forums are websites where one person post a topic to which other people can discuss.

While the map has a zoomed in version, this article shall discuss the two bigger islands, first.

*'''[http://www.2ch.net 2channel]''' is a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for 4chan.
*'''[http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites Craigslist]''' is a classified advertisement website with sections devoted to just about everything... which formerly included prostitution services, hence the '''The Former Site of Adult Services'''.

In the zoomed-in map, there is...
*'''420chan''' and '''7chan''', other imageboards in the style of 4chan (see below). Their relative lack of popularity and derivative nature leads a lot of 4chan users to mock them; hence, their position on Randall's map suggests that they're mere wads of semen.
*'''[http://ohinternet.com/ Encyclopedia Dramatica]''', labeled '''ED''' on the map , is a wiki site dedicated to chronicling internet memes and other noteworthy sites, events, people, and anything else that catches their attention in an incredibly arbitrary and vulgar manner. The site is ''heavily'' steeped in the attitude of veteran, vulgar 4chan users. People who have articles in the website tend to react with despair, given not only the cruelty in which the articles talk about the person in question, but the presence of the article means that the person is now an eternal target from the trolls. The user can not retaliate, since the userbase of Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan tends to overpower the victim easily...
:...usually. Due to the founder's talk against the Australian Aborignals (the founder is Australian), legal action has gone against the founder to the point of the founder having to shut down Encyclopedia Dramatica, founding the far tamer Oh, Internet! website, instead. Trolls responded by not only uploading their own mirror of the website but also vilifying the former founder forever.
:(Please note that, due to the malicious nature of the pop-up advertisements of Encyclopedia Dramatica, the link above points to its safe-for-work successor, Oh, Internet!)
*'''[https://www.4chan.org/ 4chan.org]''' is an {{w|imageboard}} in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as '''/b/''', is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros. This is why Randall's incarnation of 4chan is shaped like a penis.
*'''Tunnel to Habbo''' is a reference to [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pools-closed the 2006 Habbo Hotel Raids], in which hundreds of 4chan Anons simultaneously logged onto Habbo Hotel and proceeded to be as obnoxious as possible, standing in formations of swastikas and penises or body-blocking the swimming pools.
*'''{{w|Catbus}} Route''' is likely a reference to {{w|Lolcat}}s in general.
*'''[http://www.ebaumsworld.com/ eBaum's World]''' is a media-hosting website founded by Eric Bauman. The site has lost a lot of traffic after (quite valid) accusations of stolen content.
*The gulf labelled '''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) Anonymous]''' is a reference to the trolls that label themselves "Anonymous" who recently had gained national acknowledgement because of the group's real-life tirades, including cracking attacks against the Church of Scientology and the founding of WikiLeaks (a website that leaks confidential material related to governments).
*[http://www.somethingawful.com/ SomethingAwful] is a website that is meant to showcase all things "awful". SomethingAwful also has a large trollbase, but they tend to be more honorable than the ones from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan. One example is there being a spotty holding of the no-furries rule in the forums. The forums themselves are famous because of the holding of the Let's Plays of [http://lparchive.org/Dangan-Ronpa/ Dangan Ronpa] and [http://danganronpa2mirror.tumblr.com/ Super Dangan Ronpa 2], which had cooked up public interest to the point of there being an English-language release of the games.
Please note that, due to these Let's Plays being in a forums that frequently hides behind a "paywall" that requires a paid account before accessing, the links provided go to their mirrors.

==Transcript==
:'''Map of Online Communities'''
:Size on map represents volume of Daily Social activity (posts, chat, etc). Based on data gathered over the Spring and Summer of 2010.

:[Two insets on the upper left-hand corner shows that this map is a tiny portion of the huge continent of Spoken Language, encompassing portions of the Internet, Email, and Cell Phones (SMS).]

:[The largest landmass on the map by far, which takes up nearly the entire northern half of the map is "Facebook" - with large states in the south-east of the country labeled 'Farmville' and 'Happy Farm'. There is a much smaller state to the west of these called 'Farm Town'. To the north of these states is a large swath of unremarkable land entitled 'Northern Wasteland of Unread Updates.' This is directly north of the large Dopamine Sea.

:A peninsula on the south-west, just below the Plains of Awkwardly Public Family Interactions, houses many tiny states, such as MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Bebo, & Hi5. It is bordered on the south by Buzzword Bay, which contains several islands of varying sizes. Among these are YouTube and Twitter (the largest), which are separated by the Social Media Consultant Channel. To the south-east of Twitter, across the Sea of Protocol Confusion, is another, equally large island. Most of it is Skype, with the north having two largish states called AIM and Windows Live Messenger. On the south-west part of the island are two smaller states called GG and Yahoo Messenger.

:The Island of Skype is extremely close to, but separated by the Great Firewall (a dashed line), the large landmass of QQ. It's north shore is the Gulf of China and Grass Mud Horse Bay. Outside of these bays, over the Great Firewall are two islands called Craigslist and 2Channel.

:In the Dopamine Sea, off the southern shores of Farmville and Happy Farm, is MMO Isle. Its largest state is WoW, with Runescape, Lineage, Maple Story, Habbo, and the Mountains of Steam among its notable landmarks. To the southeast of the island is the Gulf of Lag, in which sits the CDC Games island, with Eve Online.

:To the east of Twitter is Troll Bay, with such islands as Reddit and Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicio.us, and Wikipedia Talk Pages. To their south are the IRC isles, of which one is the tiny island of #xkcd.

:East of these islands, and north of Skype island, is the Sea of Memes. In this sea, to the north of Craigslist and 2Channel, is an archipelago of tiny islands. There is an inset, labeled 'Forums.' (See below.)

:To the southwest if Twitter island, in the Sea of Opinions, are the blog islands. These lie south of the islands in Buzzword Bay, as well. The northernmost islands in this group are centered around the Bay of Drama, on which can be found Diary Blogs, Gossip Blogs, and Livejournal. Gossip Blogs share an island with Political, Music, and Tech Blogs. To the north of this island is a smaller island called Photo Blogs. South of Diary Blogs, and off the southwest coast of Music blogs is a smaller island called Fandom Blogs. South of Tech Blogs, off of which sprouts the small peninsula of Business Blogs, is the Spamblog Straits. On the other side of the straits is a large island made up of Miscellaneous Blogs, with two states demarcated as Religious Blogs and Blog Blogs. Southwest of the Blog Islands is the Sea of Zero (0) Comments.]

:[An inset of a group of islands in the sea of memes located on the lower right corner of the map, labeled 'Forums'. The largest by far is 4chan and /b/. Also found here are D2JSP, JLA Frums, Fan Forum, Something Awful, and many smaller ones, too numerous to list here.]

:[The northeastern third of Gossip/Political/Tech Blogs island is another inset labeled 'Blogosphere (Core)'. This can be found on the lower left corner of the map. Two peninsulas in Political Blogs bookend the Bay of Flame -- these are Liberal Blogs and Conservative Blogs. Between them lie several tiny islands such as Politics Daily, CNN Politcal Ticker, and Mediaite. Off the coast of Liberal Blogs lies the island of NYTimes, off the coast of Conservative Blogs is Libertarian Isle. Between the two lies The Talk. The northern peninsula of Tech Blogs contains places such as Gizmodo, Engadget, Joystiq, and Kotaku.]

:[Text found between the two insets, which are directly below the main map.]
:ABOUT THIS MAP
:Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community's current size and health. This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community -- that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.

:Estimates are based on the numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).

:Sources of data include Google and Bing, Wikipedia, Alexa, Big-Boards.com, StumbleUpon, Wordpress, Akismet, every website statistics page I could find, press releases, news articles, and individual site employees. Thanks in particular to folks at Last.fm, LiveJournal, Reddit, and the New York Times, as well as sysadmins at a number of sites who shared statistics on condition of anonymity.

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]
[[Category:Internet]]

256: Online Communities

2013-12-22T08:19:03Z

199.27.128.115: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 256
| date = May 2, 2007
| title = Online Communities
| image = online_communities_small.png
| titletext = I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Not every site and meme has an explanation; Transcript needs checked for completeness and cleaned up. One label unreadable, but may be obvious to someone who knows blogs well. Large version of comic unlinked.}}
'''''Note:''' This comic dates from Spring 2007. The internet changed a lot since that time.''

This is Randall's first map of online communities, with a successor (showing some zoomed-in highlights of the map) at [[802: Online Communities 2]]. As Randall says on the map, the area of each "country" is roughly proportional to its membership, at least in 2007. Geographic location means a bit more, however, as the '''Compass-Rose-Shaped Island''' points out. North-south corresponds to a spectrum from practical to intellectual, and east-west corresponds to one from web-focused to real-life-focused. The map also bears resemblance to East Asia

Randall likes to draw maps in a manner like this. Each "Country" is represented by size and related points of interest. We also have a "Sea of memes" and a small "Straits of WEB 2.0".

===Compass Rose-shaped Island===
A joke located near the middle of the map, that nonetheless serves to organise the illustration. A Compass Rose - the name for the multi-pointed star that shows where North is on the map - appears on most maps; however, here, it's actually land that just coincidentally looks like a compass rose. The "points" of the island do, however, roughly organise the map: Left is "Focus on Real Life" (labelled "IRL", an abbreviation for "In Real Life", Right is "Focus on Web", labelled ".com". Up is Practicals, labelled "N", as in "North", but with small letters making it spell "Noob", slang for a "Newbie" or "New user" - a person less experienced with the internet, as many of the sites to the top of the map are ones infamous for having large numbers of largely computer-illiterate people. Down is "Intellectuals", labelled π, an important constant in mathematics approximately equal to 3.14.

===The Icy North===
Communities which were once major players, but now in a much reduced role. While some are still fairly large, they're somewhat relics of older times, hence the "Mountains of Web 1.0" that run through them - Web 1.0 is the first major generation of websites.
* ''Yahoo!'' was the most popular search engine around 1998, but lost out to Google. It remains in business due to diversification (It now owns Tumblr, for instance).
* ''Windows Live'', particularly ''Windows Live Messenger'', used to be a particularly major way for friends to communicate, now taken over by Skype and the like.
* ''AOL'' was once a huge player in the internet service provider market, noted for sending out millions of CDroms in the '80s and '90s offering a month or so free internet service (followed by high fees and difficult cancellation). Notably, AOL was the first company to sign up large numbers of people to internet access throughout the year, whereas before then internet was mainly provided by colleges and Universities, fundamentally changing internet culture (see {{w|Eternal September}}) - This influx of new users or "Noobs" (short for "newbies") names the ''Noob Sea'' south of AOL. The ''Chat Rooms'' nearby were a selling feature of early ISPs - ways to communicate with other people from that ISP. They are largely dying now, but were a major selling point in the early days.
* ''Classmates.com'', ''Reunion.com'' Early sites that offered to help you find your former classmates from school, a role largely taken over by the big, more generalised social media sites.
* ''Friendster'': While a few rebrandings let it survive - mainly as a primarily Southeast Asian social gaming site, apparently - Friendster was the first big social media site, later outpaced by ''Myspace'' and, now, ''Facebook''. See Social Media, below.
* ''Qwghlm'': A reference to the "Baroque Cycle", a series of science fiction books by Neal Stephenson. In them, Qwghlm is a group of islands in the icy north. See [http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm http://baroquecycle.wikia.com/wiki/Qwghlm].
* ''Chasm'': A barely-readable note just below the "O" of "NORTH". This may simply be a reference to a lot of fantasy series containing a chasm. (For example, the One Ring is destroyed by flinging it into a fiery chasm in The Lord of the Rings.)
===Dating sites (Northwest coastal regions)===
* ''E-Harmony'' and ''OkCupid'' are dating sites; the other, larger sites near them are mostly social media sites.
* ''The Lonely Island'' label appears to be a joke: Surrounded by, but separate from dating sites and social media sites, it would be a rather lonely place. Probably named after "[http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Tol_Eress%C3%ABa Tol Eressëa]" (Translation: The Lonely Island) a somewhat obscure location in J. R. R. Tolkien's books, but there are {{w|The Lonely Island|other possibilities}}.

===Social Media (West)===
Sites mainly used to communicate with friends, such as Facebook and Myspace. The first large one was ''Friendster'', but this has largely become a social gaming site primarily used in Southeast Asia, as discussed in The Icy North, above. Other social media sites listed are:

* ''Faceparty'' A UK social media site started in 1999.
* ''Myspace'': A social media site partially owned by, of all people, Justin Timberlake. Started in 2003, and peaking around the time this comic was made, it nonetheless still remains popular for bands (hence "Myspace Bands" in the southwest). It was never known for having a particularly attractive web design, hence only a very small part of it labelled "Attractive Myspace Pages".
** The "Series of Tubes": A reference to an internet meme. In 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, while arguing for the end of "Network neutrality", a concept that keeps ISPs from favouring or charging more for high-speed access to sites, claimed that such regulation was needed because the Internet was "not a truck" you could just load up with as much as you want, but a "series of tubes". This is not very accurate, and his arguments were rather poor, and, as such, his speech received widespread derision, and became a running gag on the internet.
* ''Facebook'': Generally considered (at least in the West) the "modern" social media network, and the most popular. However, this comic is from 2007, and Facebook did not catch up to Myspace until 2008-2009. [Source: {{w|Myspace}}]
* ''Orkut'': A social media network launched in 2004 by Google, it became hugely popular in Brazil, India, and, to a lesser extent, Japan.
* ''Xanga'': A blogging and social media site launched in 1998.
* ''LJ'': Livejournal, a blogging site, more or less, but one that allows an internet forum-like structure where anyone, or selected people, can all start new posts on a community. Noted for a large number of teenagers, fanfic authors, and the like, hence the "Bay of Angst" to its south.
* ''Blurty'': Livejournal's software is Open Access, meaning anyone can use it to set up a site. {{w|Blurty}} is according to Wikipedia an 18+ general community using this software.

===The Blogipelago (Southwest)===
Portmanteau of blog and archipelago. Sulawesi is a real island in the Indonesian archipelago, implying that this region's similarity to Indonesia is probably intentional.

* ''Huffington Post'':
* ''Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean'': In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, Howard Dean raised funds mainly over the internet, and was doing very well, until a gaffe caused him to crash and burn just before the primaries began. See {{w|Howard Dean presidential campaign, 2004}}.
* ''Cory Doctrow's Balloon'': Reference to [[239: Blagofaire]]
* ''Boing Boing'':
* ''Technorati'': A site for searching blogs
* ''Sulawesi'': As mentioned above, a real island that is part of the Indonesian archipelago.
* ''{{w|Xu Jinglei}}'': Chinese actress. According to Wikipedia: "In mid-2006, her Chinese-language blog had the most incoming links of any blog in any language on the Internet, according to Technorati."
* ''Post Secret'': '''Placeholder.'''
* ''Point South of Technorati'': Can't read it
* ''The Wet Sea'': Perhaps a reference to a West Sea, but not sure what that would be. Maybe just a simple joke, as what else would a sea be but wet?

===Sea of Culture (Central region) ===
'''Needs descriptions of each site'''

Sites for sharing and showing off music and images, most focusing on self-created content

* ''Gulf of Youtube'':
* ''Piczo'':
* ''Broadcaster'':
* ''The Bit Torrent'' and the ''P2P Shoals'': Reference to filesharing (the passing around often copyright-infringing files, such as movies, CDs, and the like), often done with the BitTorrent protocol. A "Torrent" can also be a flood of water, hence it being used to name a river. P2P stands for "{{w|Peer-to-peer}}", the basis for the BitTorrent protocol.
* ''Flickr'':
* ''LastFM'':
* ''DeviantArt'':

"Straits of Web 2.0" - A strait is a narrow passage between two outcroppings. Web 2.0 is a term used to describe new internet architectures, which these programs and Wikipedia (the other side of the strait) are examples of. "Gays of Web 2.0" is a pun: The opposite of a gay person is a straight person.

===User-created content and discussions (Southeast)===
Sites such as {{w|Wikipedia}} and chat programs such as IRC.

* Wikipedia: The world's largest encyclopedia. Given you're on a wiki, we're going to presume you know about it.
* The Wikipedia Project: Wikipedia has generalised (actually called {{w|Wikimedia}}) to cover a number of separate web sites, though, at the time of this comic, none near the size of Wikipedia, perhaps explaining the small size of all the other vertexes of the "web".
* Usenet: The predecessor of most modern forums. A set of discussion groups that dominated the early internet.
* IRC isles: IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat - it's a simple, low-bandwith program for chatting. Common uses include Dungeons and Dragons games and other geeky pursuits. Well, common uses by me, anyway.
* SourceForge: A code repository. Basically, a place for programmers to meet up and work on a variety of free and open source projects. See {{w|sourceforge}}.
* MIT: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the most respected universities for Engineering, Robotics, and other such fields.
* Engadget: '''Placeholder'''
* Gizmodo: '''Placeholder'''
* MakeBlog: '''Placeholder'''
*Google's Volcano Fortress: A Volcano Fortress is one traditional dwelling place of evil geniuses in fiction, and Google has quietly taken over huge chunks of people's interaction with the web. Perhaps this provides some background for [[254: Comic Fragment]]?
*Stallman's Airship: A joke, perhaps in line with Cory Doctorow's Balloon ([[239: Blagofaire]], also referenced in this strip)

===Ocean of Subculture and Sea of Memes (East)===
'''Need descriptions'''
Sites related to smaller internet communities, a.k.a. "Subcultures". Also, a whole lot of internet memes, unsurprisingly. The "Viral Straits" references the idea of something "going viral", e.g. spreading quickly to huge numbers of people on the internet. These sites are often responsible for things going viral, and the memes listed are ones that went viral in the past.

'''Sites'''
* ''2Channel'' is a Japanese imageboard that was actually the original inspiration for...
* ''4Chan'' is an imageboard in which people can upload pictures while others comment on them. The website is infamous for its loose/often non-existent rules, incredibly vulgar userbase, source of new memes, and spawning of trolls. 4chan's random board, known internally as /b/, is almost constantly flooded with porn and image macros.
* ''Digg'':
* ''Fark'':
* ''Reddit''
* ''Something Awful''
* ''/.'' (Slashdot):
* ''YTMND'' is an acronym for "You're The Man Now, Dog!" It's also a community in which users can create meme-type nonsense by playing music over an image (either static or animated).
* ''Stumble Upon''
* ''Del.icio.us''

'''Memes and related'''
* ''Isle of Slash'': Slash is the habit of taking two male characters from fiction, and writing a plot where they have lots of sex. Named because of a common way of writing pairings in fanfiction, "X/Y", with / being pronounced "slash". Oh, and, "Isle of" sounds like "I love".
* ''Numa'': '''PLACEHOLDER'''
* ''Your Base'': A reference to the "All your base are belong to us" meme, a line from the game ''Zero Wing'', a game with a huge amount of hilariously badly translated {{w|Engrish}} dialogue. See [[286: All Your Base]] for more discussion of the meme.
* ''Bay of Trolls'': Trolls are people who attempt to stir up controversy by intentionally saying statements meant to annoy others into responding. "Bay" can refer to both a sheltered port, and to an animal's cry, so "Bay of Trolls" can be read as "Shelter for trolls" or "Angry shouting of Trolls". Given the communities surrounding it, both are fairly apropos.
* ''Soviet Russia'': "In Soviet Russia" jokes are a style of joke popularized by comedian Yakov Smirnoff, which since has become an internet meme. Example: "In America, you always find a party. In Russia, Party will always find you." - playing off of the idea that "Party" can also refer to "The Communist Party". The meme version usually isn't as clever as that, though. See "[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-soviet-russia in soviet russia]".
* ''SPAAARTA'': As in, "THIS! IS! SPAAARTA!!!", A famously over-the-top line from the movie ''300''.

===MMORPGs and related games (Northeast by East)===
An area dedicated to MMORPGs, large-scale games with huge numbers of players put into the same world. The label "Here there be anthromorphic dragons" references a common marking on old maps ("Here there be dragons") but updates it to joke about the more humanoid dragons seen in many games.

* Yahoo Games: A branch of Yahoo (see "The Icy North") dedicated to games (mainly boardgames). http://games.yahoo.com
* UO (Ultima Online): One of the first MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games), and the first to grow to any size. Based on the long-running ''Ultima'' RPG computer games. Started 1997.
* EQ (EverQuest): Another important early MMORPG, started 1999. UO and EQ have declined significantly since then, for a while, they were each the iconic MMORPG, but that role has been taken over by...
* WoW (World of Warcraft): 2004 MMORPG, again based on a previously-existing RPG series, and by far the largest and most iconic at the time of this comic's creation. A few others have risen to challenge it since.
* Runescape: Free-to-play fantasy MMORPG; the largest in existence.
* FFXI (Final Fantasy XI): The eleventh installment in the ''Final Fantasy'' series of video games, and the first to be a MMORPG. It didn't really take off until after this comic was made.
* Lineage: 1998 MMORPG. Particularly popular in South Korea, a country with somewhat of a cultural obsession with video games.
* Second Life: A virtual world, noted for largely working from user-generated content, which can be sold by users for real money. See {{w|Second Life}}. "Third Life" is a joke based on Second Life - if it existed it would presumably be a game people play to escape Second Life, which they play to escape their first, real life.

==Transcript==
:[Hand-drawn fantasy style map with land and sea areas representing populations of online communities. Each area or item is labeled.]
:Map of Online Communities and related points of interest. Geographic area represents estimated size of membership Map Disclaimer Text: Not a complete survey. Sizes based on best figures I could find but involved some guesswork. Do not use for navigation.

:[Land Area Labels:]
:The Icy North (Yahoo, Windows Live),
:AOL, Reunion dot com,
:Classmates dot com,
:E-harmony,
:Faceparty,
:Chasm,
:QWGHLM,
:Yahoo Games,
:Mountains of Web 1.0,
:The Lonely Island,
:MySpace,
:Attractive MySpace Pages,
:The Series of Tubes,
:Myspace Bands,
:WOW,
:Lineage,
:Second Life,
:Third Life,
:UO,
:EQ,
:FFXI,
:2channel,
:4chan,
:LJ,
:Xanga,
:Orkut,
:Cyworld,
:Blurty,
:OK Cupid,
:Facebook,
:Piczo,
:The Compass-Rose-Shaped Island,
:Broadcaster,
:Flickr,
:Last.fm,
:DeviantArt,
:Isle of Slash,
:Numa,
:Digg,
:Fark,
:Reddit,
:Your Base,
:Soviet Russia,
:(slashdot),
:Spaaarta (YTMND),
:StumbleUpon,
:Del.icio.us,
:The Blogipelago,
:Sulawesi,
:Xu Jinglei,
:Post Secret,
:Technocrati,
:[Illegible label south of Technocrati],
:BoingBoing,
:Huntingdon Post,
:Gays of Web 2.0,
:The Wikipedia project,
:MIT,
:Engadget,
:Gizmodo,
:Usenet,
:XY Singles,
:MAKE Blog,
:IRC Isles,
:Sourceforge.

:[Sea Area Labels:]
:NOOB Sea,
:Gulf of YouTube,
:Bay of Angst,
:Sea of Culture,
:Ocean of Subculture,
:P2P Shoals,
:Straits of Web 2.0,
:Here Be Anthropomorphic Dragons,
:Bay of Trolls,
:Viral Straits,
:Sea of Memes,
:The Wet Sea
:Item Labels: Shipwreck of the SS Howard Dean, Cory Doctrow's Balloon, Stallman's airship, Google's volcano fortress

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Internet]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Large drawings]]

Talk:1303: Profile Info

2013-12-18T15:56:15Z

199.27.128.115:

You think no company would use that name? Seriously? The point of using name like this is that companies harvesting profiles will not be checking the profiles manually, they would have automatic software doing that, and unlike human, this software would not be able to recognize anything weird on name like this. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 10:18, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
+1 informative [[Special:Contributions/108.162.250.8|108.162.250.8]] 11:21, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
I think that it generally goes that the automatic name-searcher things (or whatever the hell it is they're called) have some sort of rudimentary filtering system to avoid picking up spam accounts and the like, but I wouldn't know that much. Besides, if these ads are going to be designed by humans (we haven't made ad-designing robots yet, I hope), then there's going to be at least one person in the loop to check this sort of stuff.[[User:CrizBN|CrizBN]] ([[User talk:CrizBN|talk]]) 12:02, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
: A human would design the advertisement and leave a place for the software to put the elements (name/picture/etc). The software would later present the add putting in account info either at random or of people believed to be connected to the viewer. The human designing the ad would likely run through a number of test cases, but in a large data set may never notice 'poisoned' credentials. HTH. See comment below from Spongebog. [[User:JChrisCompton|JChrisCompton]] ([[User talk:JChrisCompton|talk]]) 16:42, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

To be honest, you technically can opt out of YouTube real names by linking to a Google+ Page, which does not require a legal name. However, the G+ link UI is intentionally designed to make this option difficult to find. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.219.216|108.162.219.216]] 13:58, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Interestingly Enough, there's been a court case about this kind of Thing, Lane v. Facebook Resulted in the Termination of Facebook's "Beacon" program, which was similair. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.237.7|108.162.237.7]] 14:43, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Havesting and using Peoples information -- whether names, emails content, email addresses or viewing habits is entirely automated, and hence very clever software is needed to filter out "commentary names" -- no advertiser are reviewing the actual content used gained from these harvesting processes. [[User:Spongebog|Spongebog]] ([[User talk:Spongebog|talk]])

I'm absolutely positive this would work, because I've done it. I entered "Fake Guy" as my name on some website (I can no longer remember which one) and now I regularly get spam e-mail exhortations addressed to Fake. [[Special:Contributions/108.162.221.33|108.162.221.33]] 15:36, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
:As far as spam is concerned, owning my own domain (more than one!) is a godsend. It lets me register under different <blah>@mydomain.foo for each outlet I 'need' to register with. Alongside a "Fake Guy" type personal name thing, where relevent, each place's emails is essentially marked for life (and obviously any sold-on/stolen-by database beneficiaries). Which is useful, as it allows auto-filing the more annoying circulars in their own folders, ''as well as'' the more urgent ones in places that make it obvious I should ''read straight away''! (I could also set it up to /dev/nul or forward elsewhere.) In a previous incarnation (an account, and domain, I used in my Usenet post headers) I also got a lot of "<randomtext>@domain.foo" 'hits', speculatively trying mail addresses I'd ''never'' given forth (mostly for 419 mails). Also easy to deal with. Which is not ''quite'' the target of the cartoon, but related. And (unless you're welded to the idea of multiple throwaway Hotmail/etc accounts, instead, for a no-cost version of this) you might find to be an additional layer in your anti-harvesting weaponry. (Note: a semi-throwaway "just for registering the domain" mail address might be initially needed. But still keep an eye on it or alter to something like "dns@yourdomain.foo" so you don't miss the domain-renewal alerts... which could be awkward if there's anything ''else'' potentially important coming in via that route.) But FYI, for those that don't already do something similar. Oh, and also if any mails might need replying-to (not usually necessary with registrations, these days, with at most a confirmation URI to be clicked on), check out your webmail (or standalone/portable mail app) to see what "identity management" features it has, so you can easily reply from the 'correct' personalised address. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.98.98|141.101.98.98]] 12:46, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

I created an email alias of a 128-bit randomly generated number and changed my PayPal account to use it. I never gave it to anyone but PayPal. Less than a week later, I received a fully "legitimate" DKIM-signed message from an advertiser I had never heard of. PayPal never answered my complaint. [[Special:Contributions/199.27.128.115|199.27.128.115]] 15:56, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

1287: Puzzle

2013-11-06T23:21:20Z

199.27.128.115: /* Explanation */

{{comic
| number = 1287
| date = November 6, 2013
| title = Puzzle
| image = puzzle.png
| titletext = Prediction for Carlsen v. Anand: ... 25. Qb8+ Nxb8 26. Rd8# f6 27. "... dude." Qf5 28. "The game is over, dude." Qxg5 29. Rxe8 0-1 30. "Dude, your move can't be '0-1'. Don't write that down." [Black flips board]
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete}}

The game of {{w|Go (game)|go}} (also called Weiqi, Baduk or Igo) is usually played on the 19×19 intersections of a grid, but sometimes a faster, simpler version is played on the 9×9 intersections of a grid (which thus has 8×8 squares, as a chessboard, though they are not colored in an alternating pattern - {{w|White and Black in chess|introduced to chess in the 13th century}}). In the comic, white has chess figures and plays against black, which uses go stones.

In chess, particularly in puzzles, the phrasing "White to move" indicates that it's the White player's turn; "White to play and win" indicates that it's White's turn and the next series of moves (if White plays correctly) will result in an advantageous position or possibly outright win for White. The caption "White to continue insisting this is a chessboard" is a play on this traditional phrasing.

Two versions of the board were posted by Randall: both had white after P-e3, P-d4, N-f3, N-c3, but the first with an extra bishop at e4 (B@e4), the second after B-d2.

B@e4 in the first version of the board was perhaps intended to represent confusion in White's mind whether he was playing Go (placing a piece) or Chess (it's a chess piece) - as a 'placement' this move could have been first, and could explain P-e3 with e4 already being blocked.

It it unclear who has gone first. In Go it is traditional for black to go first, while in Chess it has been traditional for white to go first for about a century. Indeed, both players have made five moves, although the caption/"punchline" implies it is the start of white's sixth turn (though if black did go first, none of his/her pieces are in the 3-3 handicap positions marked on a 9x9 Go board).

The title text refers to the upcoming {{w|World Chess Championship 2013|2013 World Chess Championship}} between Carlsen and Anand. {{w|Magnus Carlsen}} is a 22 year old Norwegian chess grandmaster, who had the highest peak rating and was the third youngest grandmaster in history. He was the world's 2009 blitz champion and is currently ranked #1 in the world by FIDE. {{w|Viswanathan Anand}} is a 43 year old Indian grandmaster currently ranked #8 in the world.

The game transcript in the title text refers to the ending of the famous {{w|Morphy versus the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard|Opera Game}} between Paul Morphy and the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard. That game ends with 16. Qb8+ Nxb8 17. Rd8#. In the title text, Black continues to make moves as if he has not been checkmated, over White's protests. After White uses his rook to capture Black's king (to emphasize the checkmate), Black defiantly writes "0-1" (the notation symbolizing a Black victory) on his scoresheet and flips the board.

The game transcript is written in standard {{w|Algebraic notation (chess)|algebraic notation}}. The destination square is represented by a lowercase letter (a-h, on the x-axis) and a number (1-8, on the y-axis), with the bottom-left square being a1 and the top-right square being h8. The uppercase letters refer to the piece that is moving to that square (e.g., Q = Queen, K = King, N = Knight, R = Rook), so Qa1 would mean moving the Queen to the bottom-left square. The absence of an uppercase letter refers to a pawn's move (e.g., "f6" means moving a pawn to f6). If the move captures a piece, an "x" is inserted between the piece and the destination (e.g., Nxb8). Checks are indicated by +, and checkmate by #.

==Transcript==
:[A game board with 8x8 white squares and black borders, like a goboard or an all white chessboard, there are white chess pieces in starting position on the bottom after P-e3, P-d4, N-f3, N-c3, B-d2 and five black Go pieces on the edges in the center of the board on d4 d5 c6 g4 g6.]
:White to continue insisting this is a chessboard

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Chess]]