Prior-to-Melting Linkage

Kanye West:

You want the historical record to be right.

Yeah, I don’t want them to rewrite history right in front of us. At least, not on my clock. I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever. But after a while, it’s like: “Wait a second; this isn’t fair. This is a setup.” I remember when both Gnarls Barkley and Justin [Timberlake] lost for Album of the Year, and I looked at Justin, and I was like: “Do you want me to go onstage for you? You know, do you want me to fight” —

For you.

For what’s right. I am so credible and so influential and so relevant that I will change things. So when the next little girl that wants to be, you know, a musician and give up her anonymity and her voice to express her talent and bring something special to the world, and it’s time for us to roll out and say, “Did this person have the biggest thing of the year?” — that thing is more fair because I was there.

But has that instinct led you astray? Like the Taylor Swift interruption at the MTV Video Music Awards, things like that.

It’s only led me to complete awesomeness at all times. It’s only led me to awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That’s all it is.

MooseStache:Someone is attempting to turn news into a flow of information chunks rather than articles:

The news business creates a pile of new content every day and then, effectively, throws it away and starts again. How does structuring news help you to you reuse content?

I call it news amnesia. If you do articles, you have to do this since you need something new today. I think it's as frustrating for journalists as it is for the readers. What we do is say “Here's the latest fact and the story it belongs in”. Maybe it belongs in two stories. We will then point these stories to each other. Nelson Mandela has been in hospital maybe five times in the last year. We have a story tracking this and people are following it and eventually when he dies we will update it. People do that already with pre-written obits but that's the exception. For a lot of other stories like legislation – say gay marriage in France – we were tracking it until it finally went through and then all we had to do was say “passed”. All the background, we already have that.

I hate Facebook, but Facebook is also an accumulation of cool data:

A photo doesn't have to be posted by a very popular page in order to trigger a large cascade. On January 17, 2013, a young Norwegian man by the name of Petter Kverneng posted a photo following the format of other "Million Likes" memes (MLM). The essence of this meme is that someone claims that they will have some sought after request granted (usually receiving a pet puppy or kitten) if their photo is liked one million times. In Mr. Kverneng's photo he is shown holding up a sign saying that his friend would have sex with him if the photo gets 1 million likes. The intent was not serious, as Mr. Kverneng later told ABC News: “it started as a joke, and it ended as a joke. Me and Catherine are just friends.” Nevertheless, the photo received a million likes in less than a day, producing a cascade of reshares, a subset of which is visualized below.