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"The thing about memes is that through repetition, they create a shared language," says Dr. 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. 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 in this viral video.

Unemployment among youth of color is widespread & complex; can a tech education startup change things?

The White House announced new participation in a jobs initiative yesterday from fast-growing technical education website Codecademy, as well as some venerable social justice oriented organizations Level Playing Field Institute and College Bound Brotherhood, a group dedicated to increasing the number of young African American men prepared for college. Called Summer Jobs +, the program aims to get young poor and marginalized people into paid technical training programs over Summer vacation.

It's an ambitious effort to tackle a very complicated problem. It's going to be a lot easier said than done.

Webscorer is an integrated system for organizing timing-sport races. It includes three components: two different iOS timing apps called Webscorer PRO and FAN and an associated website that provides results posting, online race registration and racer interaction services. You'll need iOS v3.1.3 or later. The iPad versions are optimized for the larger screens, and they are planning on Android versions in the future. It can be used by both fans and by the race organizers in any race where timing determines the winner, such as in cycling, skating, motor sports, or running races.

It is dirt simple to use: you start the clock and then tap the screen as you wish to record a time, and then enter the racer's name. When you want to upload the results, you tap a few other buttons and enter the sport information.

German social bookmarking service Mister Wong was, not so long ago, an ambitious, well-used, innovative project. It was also the subject of heated international controversy online. Today the service finds itself put up for sale by parent company Construktiv. In a post on the company's German language blog, Mister Wong says its changing priorities require it to seek a new operator.

Mister Wong instituted a number of different features appreciated by users, like automatic Twitter sync to save shared links, a Delicious importer and an attractive mobile version of the site. The service also faced a substantial amount of criticism, though, for its name and branding. So much criticism that it provided an interesting opportunity to talk about contemporary racial stereotypes, the importance of intention and more.

Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook. The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook's collegiate origins encouraged a group of slightly more educated mainstream community members. Meanwhile, MySpace encouraged self-expression and the organizing of subcultures. boyd's latest paper entitled, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook" suggests that those same origins also propel race-based divisions. She likens the mass teen migration from MySpace to Facebook to "white flight".

Facebook used to be dominated by white and Asian users, but tonight the company announced results of a demographic study of its users concluding that the percentages of black and Hispanic users of the site are now approaching their percentages of the population in the general U.S. public. Hear that? Facebook scientists have looked at the data and everything is OK now.

For months, we've been calling on Facebook to open up user data in an appropriate way for the public at large to study.

According to a recent study conducted by dating website OKCupid, "Black women are sweethearts... white men are sh*tty," and white people in general are a horrible bunch of xenophobes.

The company recently ran some numbers on response rates for messages sent between almost a million otherwise compatible men and women of varying races, and the results are eye-opening. "Whenever we compare the match/reply charts for a given breakdown of the population, they should look about the same," the related blog post reads. "However, this, like so many other fine assumptions, totally breaks down when race gets involved."

The 20th century news and stock ticker used to be one of the most archetypal images of newsrooms all around the world. It was timely and exciting, if a bit impersonal, for editors to watch the wires for breaking news from the big news syndicates and select stories to run in the local paper. That ticker doesn't print everything out any more, though, and a constant stream of news is something that millions of consumers now see for themselves inside their RSS feed readers.

How are newspapers adapting to digital syndication? Today the Associated Press announced that more than 500 newspapers are using their service called the AP Member Marketplace. To web savvy consumers, the Marketplace might look like an RSS reader that publishes selected stories to a webpage built out of Del.icio.us badges. It's a pretty interesting program.