As part of our web feature, we came up with the idea last week that we'd create a timeline of some of most popular memes throughout the last 12 years or so just to track how far memes have come, how they have manifested over time as well as identify any that have 'stood the test of time' so to speak.
Our thought was to create an interactive timeline complete with the year that the meme became popular, an accompanying picture and a brief caption detailing its origins and definition. While unfortunately our skills, time and resources limits us to making a slick, well designed and easy to navigate timeline like the BBC or the NY Times, there are Wordpress widgets available that will provide us with at least with a similar effect.
Out of all the timeline widgets available to us for free, the one that looks the most professional is TimeRime. TimeRime allows you to add key images, multimedia (music and videos) and text to your timeline. By hovering the mouse over the image it brings up any associated text and when you click on it, an information box below the timeline displays any extra information. This widget should easily allow us to successfully create our meme timeline and is particularly handy if the meme originated from a video as you are able to embed that kind of multimedia material.
Source: Screenshot
While we aim to provide a comprehensive list of popular and memorable memes, we will have to be extremely selective with our choices as a timeline with too many events can become difficult to read and understand. We want to pick the key memes that defined the year and we can use reference articles (such as 'Best Memes of 2011') from the database website Know Your Meme. As I have said before I still think it is important for us to define the boundaries of what a meme is and whether it extends to viral videos (although certainly there are crossovers like Overly Attached Girlfriend which was originally a YouTube video but became an image macro) as the Know Your Meme articles do tend to include YouTube videos in them - this will also help us narrow down our options.
From our preliminary research, some of the memes we'd like to include are:
- 2001: All your bases are belong to us
- 2003: Pedobear, Orly, Trololololol
- 2005: Chuck Norris
- 2006: Lolcats, demotivators
- 2007: Rickrolling
- 2009: Kanye 'Imma let you finish'
- 2010: Bed Intruder song, Old Spice
- 2011: Planking, Friday (Rebecca Black)
2 comments:
TimeRime looks fantastic.
It's one of the neater timeline widgets I've seen. I like how the images are all inline (reminiscent of iTunes Cover Flow) and that a mouse-hover allows readers to see the expanded image and associated details. The separation of the images and text make for a clear interface as opposed to other messy timeline widgets out there.
Nice find and definitely appropriate for our purpose.
Yeah I agree with Jeremy. I was a bit disappointed with the stuff that I had found and the few we looked at the other day when we met up, but this one is much more aesthetically pleasing and more what we all probably had in mind when we decided on having a timeline.
Post a Comment