Crowdsourcing
by Jeff
Image text: We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'
This comic is a take on the way that a lot of new businesses "crowd source" their products, so they do not have to actually do anything. Which the image text indicates is only "playing shooters", which is short for first person shooter video games.
Old-Timers
by Jeff
Image text: You were on the internet before I was born? Well, so was I.
Ok, definitions you need to understand this one.
A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is an online service based on microcomputers running appropriate software.
The J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) is a non-profit genomics research institute founded by J. Craig Venter, Ph.D. in October 2006.
So, is the girl on the right 6 years old?
Klout
by Jeff
Image text: Though please do confirm that it's actually *me* on Klout first, and not one of my friends trying to get me punched. The great thing about this douchebag deadman switch is that I will never dare trigger it.
Klout is a site that seeks to measure your "influence" on social media networks. Users grant other users +Ks for certain things. They also give away things to the users with the highest Klout scores. Universally, it is regarded as meaning absolutely nothing. The people that are really wrapped up in the score are typically not well-liked. The only usage I have seen of it lately is ironically, like giving someone a +K for knowledge about "Pitbull". (The Bud Light promoter and producer/rapper/musician, etc not the type of dog.)
Kickstarter
by Jeff
Image text: If you pledge more than $50 you'll get on the VIP list and have first dibs on a slot on ANY of the pledge levels in the actual campaign.
If you are not familiar with Kickstarter, it is (in their own words) a platform for funding creative projects in which anyone can give money at any level of funding starting usually as low as $10. Funding at different levels gets you different perks.
In this comic, Black Hat is attempting (and as you can see, failing) to game the system by raising money to work on the perfect Kickstarter pitch. That is surprising because usually Black Hat is successful with his gambits. The irony of the image text is that you do not need to be on any VIP list to have dibs on the pledge levels. Anyone can give any amount of money. That is the goal of Kickstarter and it has been wildly successful.
Visited
by Jeff
Image text: I hate when I read something like '... tension among the BASE jumpers nearly led to wingsuit combat ...', and I get excited because 'wingsuit combat' is underlined, only to find that it's just separate links to the 'wingsuit' and 'combat' articles.
This comic is a reference to how an internet browser will make the links of the pages that you have visited a different color than the links that you have not visited. In the case of wikipedia, they are blue for non visited and purple for visited. In this comic, Randall is ashamed of the pages he has visited, because with the color changes there is evidence of what he has done in the past.
So, I can't quite figure who who this fake article is supposed to be about, but the Macarena band is certainly from Dos Hermanas, Spain. So, it is quite possibly a made up article from Randall.
Constraints
by Jeff
Image text: [title-text similarly alphabetized]
Sorry all, I'm still alive. Just on vacation. I'll keep this one short since it is late.
An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising or satirical statement.
Just in case you have been living under a rock for the last several years, Twitter is a short message social network / communication service. All messages on the service need to be under 140 characters, including private messages.
I'm not sure about the backwards alphabetization, anyone?
Ablogalypse
by Jeff
Image text: Plus the reaction in the Tumblverse is always 'repeatedly get hit by a dog and fall down the stairs'.
Ok, lets see: blog, you know what that is because you are currently reading one. Tumblr is a more of a "micro-blogging" site, which has taken off due to the prevalence of animated gifs and funny photos. Wordpress is a type of blog software. Livejournal is a sort of personal blog site that as you can see hasn't been really popular at all since 2004-2005.
As you can see in the caption and then the image text, there is no way that newscasters will reference the "Tumblrverse" because all the reactions will be filled with animated gifs of a person in a raptor suit falling over or a dog answering a phone.
Umwelt – Follow Up
by Jeff
Thanks everyone for commenting and emailing and showing off what you got from yesterday's comic. It was pretty much insane. One such person who did all of the work to find all the variations was the reddit user SomePostMan. He had an incredible multiple comment post thread with all the variations and with his permission, I'm going to recreate that thread here after the jump. Thanks to SomePostMan and I've included some of his thoughts below as well.
Reviews
by Jeff
Image text: I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord.
This comic couldn't be more true. When shopping for anything via reviews, whether it be electronics or even something as simple as lamps like the comic demonstrates, one negative review can spoil a lot of positive reviews. That hits home even more if the review is specific. This usually occurs because humans attach more weight to anecdotes and specific stories. This comic points out the absurdity of paying attention to those reviews. The 2nd frame starts out normal and then proceeds to get more and more absurd all the way to the image text.
In the image text, Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia.
Share Buttons
by Jeff
Image text: The only post to acheive perfect balance between the four was a hilarious joke about Mark Zuckerberg getting caught using a pseudonym to sneak past the TSA.
This comic is a commentary on what sort of articles work best on different social networks. The comedy article is shared most on Twitter because everyone on Twitter considers themselves some sort of 140-character comedian. (140 characters is the limit of a single tweet.)
Conspiracy theory articles that are against the Christian Right and for Wikipedia play well on Reddit as those type of articles get the most votes up and the most comments.
Boycott Facebook articles (or other Facebook "is changing their terms of services to...") are very popular on Facebook, which is always obviously ironic. Also, this is the highest number of shares on Google plus, Google's fledgling social network.
And the last article gets very few shares, because who wants to admit they are reading an article about a Realdoll, which has been referenced twice previously in xkcd comics. As I say in the Flying Cars explanation, Realdoll is known as "the world's finest lovedoll". You can probably figure it out from there.