Web Monitor
17:54 UK time, Wednesday, 26 August 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor is touched to see Paper Monitor's new co-workers - the readership - unite against possible treading on toe action. Paper Monitor reads papers. Web Monitor reads the web. Lets get on with it.
• It's not often that you hear feminists referring to themselves as birds but, as , pro-war feminists - the Feminist Hawks - are on a mission to spread their word on the internet.
Web Monitor has reported before on feminist blogs being few and far between. In the Heffernan says the partnership between combative right-wingers and feminists was an unlikely marriage made on the internet, led by "unobvious" feminist, US conservative David Horowitz:
"Hawkish sites that have taken up feminism include Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch and Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine. On a recent day, the home page of the last featured reports of female prisoners being raped in Iran; prepubescent girls getting married in Gaza; and a possible honor killing by an immigrant in New York. This material is expected to help seal Horowitz's general case for the war on terror, though he has not yet changed the name of his cause to, say, the war on misogyny."
• Advertisers, it seems are trying to elbow in on social media sites. This makes poor old Web Monitor very tired, wading through the seemingly infinite viral videos to find internet gold, only to discover they were trying to sell us something all along.
As noted in Web Monitor before, flash mobs and a YouTube channel. Meanwhile the viral video stop motion trend also on WM was to help flog their cameras. WM also observed that the only viral capable of pushing Michael Jackson songs from dominating the whole top 10 of the viral video charts after his death was an .
Now that price comparison websites are in crisis talks to come up with the next big cult advert. And it's all down to one smartly dressed meerkat. Beale says that Aleksandr Orlov, the Meerkat character selling the compare-the-market website, has 536,542 fans on Facebook, at least 24,000 Tweeters are following him on Twitter and nearly 1,000 people have signed his petition to get the word "seemples" - simple - into the Oxford English Dictionary:
"The price comparison sites spend millions of pounds buying bucket loads of airtime and then filling it with some of the blandest, hammiest ads on the box. Now that Aleksandr has them all held to ransom, panic is setting in. Appealing to our penny-pinching instincts with cheap and nasty advertising is no longer good enough. There might be a recession on but we are not buying advertising tat any more. Aleksandr has shown the price-comparison market can appeal to our purses with élan."
• It looks like Web Monitor may have found the earliest traces of the word pimp.
Having pondered yesterday just when exactly the word came to have a positive meaning - to decorate - a read of numerous word blogs (mentioned in Web Monitor previously) didn't disappoint. However it is on the internet Goliath - Wikipedia's - site where, in the , it is claimed the word pimp has actually gone full circle from positive to negative to positive:
"It is believed to have stemmed from the French infinitive pimper meaning to dress up elegantly."
Web Monitor is still soliciting examples of pimp turning up in unusual places. Just send the link via the letters box to the right of this. To get you started, here's one from the .
The use of the word pimp provoked discussion from New Scientist regular readers, when commenter James wrote about his son's use of the word in its positive meaning. "Correct Man" explained to James what he saw as the turning point of the word:
"Can I please explain the origin of the word 'pimp' as used on cars, bikes, penknives etc. It does derive from the Pimp of yesteryear, or more precisely, the gaudy cars they stereotypically drive. Remember they guy in Magnum Force that the corrupt copper blew away. His car had been pimped to the max. So the word has a new meaning as a verb, that, though derived from an unpleasant source, is no longer offensive when used correctly. You can tell from the context how the word should be interpreted, to deliberately misinterpret the meaning is just being facetious.
Of course, if your son comes home and says he is pimping his classmates, further enquires may be warranted."
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