Ryan Gosling Feminist, one of the smarter iterations of this meme was created by Danielle Henderson, a graduate student in the University of Wisconsin Madison's women and gender studies program. We asked her a few questions about her take on the popularity of "Hey Girl." And just days after we did that, the Internet produced Museum Hey Girl, for the artier among us. Hey Girl Happy Hannukah appeared on December 20, the first day of the holiday.

This is not at all the first celebrity-inspired Internet memes. LesbiansWhoLookLikeJustinBieber points to the secret that everyone fears blurting lest they appear homophobic - Justin Bieber is as androgynous as most boyish lesbians, and vice versa. And then there's RappersDoingNormalShit, which makes the all-mighty rapper appear as mundane as your boring next-door neighbor.

These memes are never-ending virtual art shows curated by either one person or the collective Internet. Henderson wasn't really thinking about that when she created FeministRyanGosling, which provides a feminist context to the blank slate that is the open-ended "Hey Girl" meme.

"I don't really follow memes, and don't think of what I'm doing as fitting into that category," she tells us. "I'm still just posting flashcards for my friends, and could stop the whole thing tomorrow. I have no allegiance to this format. I'm just a nerd trying to get through the semester."
 
Truth be told, she actually dislikes memes and the collective impact they've had on the Internet-at-large.

"It's like in junior high when people would repeat the same joke over and over again until eventually it removed all joy and just filled you with contempt," she says. "I think memes contribute to the community feeling everyone thinks the Internet should instill in us so that we don't feel so bad about spending most of our free time communicating to a machine, but they mostly serve to remind me how unoriginal and boring we've become."

Like the nice guy who won't leave your side, Ryan Gosling hangs on till the bitter end - even when the meme he inspires makes us feel like completely unoriginal pop culture-obsessed media consumers. Henderson, for one, counts herself as one engaged in this love/hate relationship with memes. "I'm including myself here, of course," she tells us, "as what I'm doing is totally derivative."

Here's a full list of the "Hey Girl" meme iterations that we've found.

• Hey Girl I'm A Serial Killer
• Librarian Hey Girl
• Ex-Boyfriend Ryan Gosling
• Feminist Ryan Gosling
• Ryan Gosling Disneyland Cats
• Typographer Ryan Gosling
• Fuck Yeah Ryan Gosling
• Museum Hey Girl
• FeministRyanGosling
• Hey Girl Shabbat Shalom
• Manarchist Ryan Gosling
• Public Policy Ryan Gosling
• Law School Ryan Gosling
• Preservationist Ryan Gosling
• Stage Manager Ryan Gosling
• "Campaign Staff" Ryan Gosling
• Biostatistics Ryan Gosling
• Medieval History Ryan Gosling
• Handmade Ryan Gosling
• Programmer Ryan Gosling
• Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling
• Teacher Ryan Gosling

Please enjoy a few more variations on "Hey Girl." We picked these especially for you.

Ryan Gosling Typography

Ryan Gosling Feminist

Ryan Gosling Stage Manager

Did we miss any variations on "Hey Girl"? Let us know in the comments below. We'll add them to the list.

According to the Truthy project, a research effort from Indiana University, much of what you're seeing on Twitter these days consists of "political smear campaigns, astroturfing, and other social pollution."

The Truthy project analyzes where the memes originate from, how they're spread and how those users are connected to verify their validity. The algorithm also examines "the time of posts, the number of users involved, broadcaster history, the unique topology of the diffusion network, and so on". When a meme is determined suspect, users on the site can help to provide crowdsourced annotations as to what the particular meme is attempting to say.

Bruno Gonçalves, a research associate on the project, told MIT's Technology Review that the basic hope behind these astroturfed memes is to convince viewers of the Tweets' validity by offering context.

"If you hear the same message from many different sources that you think are independent who are saying the same thing, you're much more likely to believe it," he said.

One example of the sorts of accounts the Truthy project is looking to expose is that of @peacekaren_25. The description of this particular account points out a number of suspicious points:

The account @PeaceKaren_25 does not disclose information about the identity of its owner. It has generated a very large number of tweets (over 10,000 in four months). Almost all of these tweets support several Republican candidates, especially House GOP leader John Boehner, whose account @GOPLeader is very frequently retweeted or mentioned. @PeaceKaren_25's tweets also frequently include links to various websites supporting the same candidates, especially John Boehner's website, gopleader.gov, as well as his Facebook page, blogs, gop.gov, etc.

Before you take off one way or another, know that the site claims it is a non-partisan research group, so there's likely fodder there for both sides of the fence. The best way to get started is to take a look at the gallery, which offers a bunch of "truthy memes" with crowdsourced explanations of what you're seeing.

Mediagazer is the first new service that Rivera's team has launched in four years. As both Rivera and McCarthy note, the team has spent the last four years learning about what works (and what doesn't). Based on this experience, the team has "outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor."

It will be interesting to see how Rivera's team will manage the overlap between the tech news and media news sites. Currently, for example, this VentureBeat story - which is about both the tech and the media business - is featured on both sites.

Unlike Techmeme, Mediagazer doesn't feature a leaderboard, but there are mobile sites for smartphones and feature phones.

Judging from what we have seen so far, Mediagazer will surely become another must-read site for anybody interested in the media business, be it blogging, e-book or the state of the newspaper industry.

For more information about the role of the human editors at Techmeme, also have a look at our interview with Megan McCarthy.

"Never Going to Give You Up" is published under the RCA record label, which is a property of Sony. Originating on outlaw web forum 4chan and leading to a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade appearance by Astley 20 years after the song was released, RickRolling isn't dead - it's just safe now, in the official copyright friendly section of YouTube.

Update: A YouTube spokesperson has now said that pulling the video was done on mistake.

Meanwhile the official version on Vevo already has more than 22 million views as well. RickRolling may not be dead, but it's probably over being cool. Here at ReadWriteWeb we've moved on to other things anyway. Like Pickle Surprise.

YouTube wants to monetize those moments. According to the announcement, YouTube will determine video eligibility after looking at factors like traffic, virality and compliance with the community's Terms of Service. If your clip is determined to be the next big meme, Google will contact you to enable revenue sharing and offer you AdSense options on your video page. If you plan on following up your hit video with a meme-worthy sequel, the company encourages you to sign up for the YouTube Partners Program and take advantage of enhanced channel features.

Before you run off to make your video, remember a few rules of thumb:
1. Own the Rights: Make sure you are well within your rights to use the music, media, etc. that you plan to incorporate in your video. YouTube won't offer you revenue share if you appear to be walking a legal gray line.
2. Keep it Clean: Avoid using offensive or obscene language and images. Few advertisers want their messaging coupled with something they see as inappropriate or likely to alienate their customers.
3. Entertain and Elevate: The YouTube community may not be the most high-brow bunch, but it certainly knows the hottest memes. Research your subject matter before putting yourself out there. What may be funny or interesting to you could be last month's news to the community (and in Web years, last month actually equals 5 years ago).

Two common ways that have developed are link tracking and meme tracking. In the first case, it's fairly simple - just take all the URLs posted on Twitter, uncompress them if necessary, add up the uniques, and sort them by popularity. But today we are going to focus on the latter case, services that look for a specific keyword, topic, or hashtag (all falling under the fuzzy category of meme or viral idea) and cluster related tweets together.

There are two types of topic trackers out there: List and waterfall. The first category (and first four on our list) are basically search engines for Twitter keywords, perhaps with a little extra thrown in. The second category is very much as it sounds - real-time Twitter results that flow down the screen like a waterfall.

Tweetizen

Tweetizen (sounds like citizen) is a relatively new discovery that was brought to my attention via a comment on my Tinker post. Tweetizen has a lot of power hidden behind its simple facade. There are two main types of groups that you can create, friends and interests. Friend groups are just that: friend groups. Add a bunch of your Twitter friends' nicknames here and generate an instant stream with just their updates. Very nice!

Interest groups are more complex, they are similar to, but more powerful (in some ways) than Tinker, which we covered here. You can start out by giving your new group a name, and then choose any combinations of keywords to search for. The real power here is anything you enter here gets passed directly through to the Twitter search API. So, if you want to search for #followfriday, but only see tweets including the word 'Saturday', use Saturday as your search term, and #followfriday as your tag term. Then, go to advanced options and select 'use all of these tags & text'. You can also remove keywords from your search results by putting a minus (-) in front of the term. As a demonstration, I constructed this simple group as an example: FollowFriday Saturday. I'll leave experimenting with other Twitter search terms (like from:) as an exercise for the reader to try.

Some other great features of Tweetizen are; the ability to embed groups on external web pages, using Twitter OAuth to be able to directly create or reply to tweets in a group you've made, a live refresh option, and extra filtering options to remove tweets without URLs and retweets.

Twitscoop

Twitscoop is a clever site that shows a constantly-updating cloud of popular terms (although not necessarily hashtags) that you can click on to get some more details. You can also grab a widget that creates a new cloud every time it is refreshed. Finally, there is trend tracking that gives you a constantly-refreshing list based on username, tag or keyword, plus a little graph on the popularity of the search term over time. An expanded view of search results is also available, like this one.

TweetChannel

TweetChannel is a very clean site that is similar to Tinker in that it attempts to link a user's login with certain hashtag topics. In order to create your own channel, you must provide your Twitter login and password, which causes you to automatically start following a Twitter user @tweet_channel. This is the listener account for the service. Once logged in, you can create your own hashtag-based channel and any subsequent tweets you send out with that hashtag will show up in TweetChannel, under that channel. You can then grab an RSS feed of anything from that channel (or any other channel registered in the service). For example, you can check out the #sandbox channel.

Tweetscan

Tweetscan is the only application in this round-up with a subscription fee. But after we tell you some of its features, you may find subscribing worthwhile. Its unassuming front page offers a trending topic cloud that you can click on to bring up a quick search result, or you can use the search bar. Once search results are up, you will notice some unusual refinements; first is choice of service! Yes, Tweetscan supports identi.ca. You can also narrow results by user, and grab an RSS feed of any search, even tweet your custom search link. Example #followfriday search here.

Additionally, Tweetscan offers the paying customer the ability to download any search result as a CSV (comma separated value) file, suitable for import into a spreadsheet or database application, as well as sending regular search result updates via email. Also, Tweetscan has a separate portal specifically for searching user profiles! We are actually fairly impressed with this tool, it is trying to bring more to the table in exchange for a small subscription fee.

Twistori

Twistori (not to be confused with Twistory, which lets you add tweets to a calendar) is one of the original Twitter meme waterfalls. It is based on an infographic art project by Jonathan Harris called We Feel Fine, and its mission is very straightforward: You can choose from 6 verbs that show up quite commonly on Twitter, and once chosen, you get a reverse waterfall highlighting recent, anonymous tweets containing a personal use of that verb. Very zen and relaxing, but more art that function.

Extra features include a mac screensaver version and a custom mac application.

Twitterfall

Twitterfall is basically where twitterers go after they watch Twistori for a while and want a tool they can use to make their own custom waterfalls. Twitterfall supports searching for keywords and hashtags, and will support additional search parameters like the minus to exclude terms (mentioned above) and the from: operator to limit tweets from a single account. You can see my FollowFriday Saturday example here.

All the parameters for your waterfall experience are adjustable, from the background color theme to the appearance speed of new tweets. You can log in via Twitter OAuth (although that didn't work for me, it falls back to a traditional login prompt) in order to perform operations on tweets in the waterfall, such as replying and retweeting. The waterfall helpfully pauses if you hover over a tweet. You can limit search results to a specific geographic region.

There are also widgets for the Mac and Windows desktop but no javascript embed or RSS output, which is unfortunate. Although, you can save your custom searches if you log in.

Monitter

Monitter takes the Twitterfall concept a step further by giving you not one but three fully-customizable keyword search waterfalls that are constantly updated with recent tweets. Each search, like with Tweetizen and Twitterfall, is passed directly to the search API so you can add advanced parameters to fine-tune your results. There is also support for regional tweets, although it looks like imposing a region affects every column, which may be overkill.

Monitter pipes Twitter search results directly back out into the columns in a waterfall format. Oddly, the RSS icons link directly to Twitter search query results. Also, there doesn't seem to be any way of sharing columns with other people. I did discover though that apparently the session is saved in a cookie so, you can feel safe leaving the page and returning to it later.

Extras include the ability to add or remove columns and a customizable jquery widget that, with a bit of PHP programming skill, you can add to your blog's web page.

A final note we would like to mention about Monitter: It seems to like Chrome a lot more than Firefox. It may just be my setup, but as a warning, your mileage may vary.

Honorable Mentions

There are a number of very similar web apps, which I am calling "Twitter search front-ends," that all replicate the same functionality in slightly different ways:

1. Twendz: Created by marketing firm Waggener Edstrom, Twendz is just a nice, clean Twitter search utility that supports a waterfall result and advanced search term constructions. Here is an example Followfriday search.
2. Tweetzi: No affiliation or creator name attached to this search, but it has the distinction of using the biggest Courier font we've ever seen plus the ability to filter by mood. Good stuff. Example search here.
3. Twemes: Twemes is one of the few web sites we looked at that doesn't seem to use the Twitter search API directly. Unfortunately, as a result it is extremely slow on certain searches. It does have a couple of unusual features but the interface and responsiveness get in the way of this being a useful tool.

Finally, we would like to give a shout out to Birdsall's Massive Twitter Sites & Tools Directory page that made finding these apps much less of a chore than it could have been.

Just this month, Facebook finally surpassed MySpace as the top social networking site in the U.S., and judging from this data some of that surge can be attributed to the 25 Things meme.

It would probably be wrong to attribute all of Facebook's growth to the '25 Random Things' meme, but the renewed interest in notes on Facebook is most likely fully attributable to this. Notes on Facebook are basically small blog posts, and represent the only space on the site where you can respond after being tagged to write 25 random things about yourself.

Given that the 25 Things meme has now reached both Time Magazine and the New York Times, we assume that this fad is slowly coming to an end, but even so, Facebook has clearly profited from it in the last two months.