Interactive Map Of Stupid

Well, OK, there's many different kinds of stupid, but this is one of my favorites. rickrolldb.com in amassing a database of Rickrolls, web pages which trick the user into viewing 80's pop icon Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. Ostensibly this is so that web users pissed at being taken for a dance can add the database to their browser's ad blocker. Since YouTube Rickrolled it's entire user base on April 1st 2008 it has gone irrepairably mainstream and is officially an old meme - unfunny outside its legitimate use in harassing Scientology.

But this database intrgues me. It's a realtime dataset showing the growth and manifestation of a meme, empirical data against which theories of meme behavior can be falsified or corroborated. There are other such datasets which can be created, one can track the reproduction of files on p2p networks (actually, I did study this, a story for another day) or the spread of threatening chain messages in YouTube comments. This is different though, the YouTube data is messed up by anti-spam systems that arbitrarily check and confine the meme's spread, and file sharing is a little simplistic. rickrolldb on the other hand is a real-time map showing the spread and use of a learned behavior in a human population. A limited demonstration that stupidity is contagious :-)