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"The thing about memes is that through repetition, they create a shared language," says Professor Julie Levin Russo, an adjunct assistant professor at Brown's Modern Culture & Media Program. "If you understand the premise of the meme, you can communicate a lot very easily, with whatever twist you're putting on the meme structure."

On Jan 4, the "Shit Girls Say" meme was radically transformed. New York-based graphic designer & video blogger Franchesca Ramsey a.k.a. Chescaleigh unleashed "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls", and it blew up the Internet. In the video, Ramsey plays her blonde-haired white friend who she portrays as curiously confused, and innocently ignorant. "Why isn't there a white entertainment television? The Jews were slaves too, and you don't hear us complaining all the time," Chescaleigh as-white-girl asks the camera. She portrays her friend as at times confused ("Is this racist?") other times annoyed. Overall, her white friend is completely unaware of fundamental cultural and racial differences between her and her black friend. It's these awkward moments that fuel the humor of this viral video.

This is old (as in 2007 old). The kid in the video is now seven years old and undoubtably jailbreaks his iPhone and programs Arduino boards. But five years ago he was just a toddler with a bottle, and this was the first time he was on the Web and Fleek-ler!, as he called it, on his own. It was "the moment" - the moment when you first realize that moving the cursor and clicking the trackpad leads to discovery, and that discovery is a whole lot of fun.

StumbleUpon is one of those sites we've had on our radar for quite sometime. We covered the company's redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.

The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user's direct stumbling experience.

If you didn't make it to London for Monki Gras, the follow on conference to Monktoberfest, you missed out on quite a lot of great content and beer.

The conference is organized by RedMonk, an unusual analyst firm. Their conferences, reflecting the analysts at RedMonk, are unusual as well. The Portland, Maine event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady, who resides in Maine. This time around, the event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder James Governor.

Space sucks. Literally. The void of space is one perpetual vacuum that would suck the brain out of any exposed human through their ears. In space there is also unfiltered radiation, extreme temperatures and a multitude of other ways that humans can be harmed outside of low-Earth orbit. Learning how to mitigate radiation and improve space crews' health are two of 16 recommendations made by the National Research Council to NASA for the agency's technological focus in the next five years.

Researchers announced yesterday that they have discovered a new potential "Goldilocks" planet in a different solar system. A "Goldilocks" planet is one found within the habitable zone in orbit around a star - not too hot, not to cold - that could potentially support life. In hundreds of years, after humanity has exhausted all of Earth's natural resources, we may need to migrate to one of these planets. So, NASA should hurry up and get cracking on the NRC's recommendations. Best to be prepared in the face of an uncertain future.

"Conflict minerals," those mined to support groups conducting armed conflict or engaging in human rights abuses, have been an issue since long before we first wrote about it in July of 2010. The mineral equivalent of blood diamonds, they include tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold, all of which are used to manufacture our electronics.

Nokia, the world's largest manufacturers of mobile phones, today published its policy on conflict minerals.

In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we're dealing with?

Donna Burbank - who's a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies' long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. "When I talk to our customers, they tell me it's a whole new... thing, for lack of a more technical word. They've heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don't have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don't want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand."

iTunes Match, the cloud music-matching service that Apple launched last year, is a great way to sync one's music library across numerous devices. If your collection happens to contain songs with profane lyrics, however, you may be in for a surprise.

Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the "clean" version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.

Entrepreneur aficionado extraordinaire Robert Scoble posited a question on his Rackspace blog yesterday asking if there is push back against HTML5 by the top mobile designers in San Francisco. He cited new apps Path, Storify and Foodspotting as prominent examples of great apps with acclaimed UX that were rendered in native languages as opposed to HTML5. Are top developers really pushing back against HTML5 or is Scoble once again a little too deep in his fantasy world?

Sunday's Super Bowl is full of betting possibilities, but one line we couldn't find in Vegas is whether or not Twitter will crash because of heavy traffic during the game.

This year's NFL playoffs have already set one record for the most tweeted sports moment in history, when a Tim Tebow pass stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers on the first play of overtime against the Denver Broncos. The 9,420 tweets per second were not enough to cripple Twitter, but on New Year's Eve in Japan 16,197 per second brought the service down. There is speculation that this year's Super Bowl will set new records for both Facebook and Twitter.

"I'm not sure if we're the only two on right now or not," says a voice with an American accent. The voice belongs to a man who identifies himself as Bruce, likely an FBI agent, who had just joined a conference call with other law enforcement officials based in the UK.

The irony of hearing Bruce utter those words at the beginning of the call is that, no, they were not the only people listening in. Somehow, members of Anonymous managed to tap into the call, record it and then post it online for all to hear. The subject of the conversation? Tracking and arresting online activists and hackers, such as those who secretly associate with Anonymous.

You would think that a company with 423 million monthly active mobile users would find a way to squeeze some revenue out of them. Easier said than done. The biggest question to come out of Facebook's S-1 filing for its IPO was how the company could monetize its robust mobile app ecosystem. How will Facebook do it? Stitching in mobile banner ads is not likely a solution for Facebook. We explore Facebook's opportunities and ask for your opinion in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

Facebook's IPO filing, released this week, is fascinating for many reasons: We've already covered several angles.

Perhaps the most exciting, though, is the wealth of data about the company that is finally public - from its user statistics to its growth around the world to its finances. I've highlighted and visualized some of the most interesting data in this series of charts.

Picture this: You're at a party, and your good friend introduces you to one of their friends. You two hit it off, and boom - a new friend! You've just become friends with a friend of a friend. In real life, this is a common occurrence. On Facebook, a friend of a friend isn't necessarily an actual friend.

A new study from Pew Internet discovered this and an array of other interesting facts about peoples' Facebook friendships. The researchers found that most peoples' friend lists were not very interconnected. In a friend list with a density of 1, everyone knows everyone. On Facebook the density is quite low at .12 with a maximum density of .42, which means that your chances of knowing a friend of a friend on Facebook fall between 12% and 42%. In its its S-1 filing on Wednesday, Facebook toted 100 billion friendships. What it probably meant to say was 100 billion connections, many of which are dormant.