Monday, February 15, 2010

History Makes The Internet Less Useful

I don't really follow the NBA, but one of the few clips I remember is Kevin Garnett, back in his early Timberwolves years, delivering a massive dunk. The announcer yells "Kevin Garnett! With no regard for human life!". It's fairly stunning, at least for basketball. But, if you search for "garnett no regard for human life" on The Youtube, you get a bunch of results for ... LeBron James dunking on Kevin Garnett in 2009 and the announcers making a witty reference that would only be caught by sports nuts:

I worry that this sort of thing will happen more and more often, as homages make it difficult to find the original work. The Internet appears to be very bad at finding the second-most popular reference to certain things.

5 comments:

Chris said...

One more reason why Wikipedia is the greatest website ever: the whole point of disambiguation pages is to make it trivial to find the second-most popular references to things. Unfortunately, since they're updated manually, they're not exactly scalable to the whole internet.

JoelW said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc55hijZgRs

First dunk on the clip

Nick Beaudrot said...

Wow, that's not at all the dunk as I remember it. It's amazing what the minds eye does.

Mary said...

One of the things that does make me feel like an old lady is that I really resent folks who repost content from other sites without attribution or acknowledgement - homages are fine, I think, but I appreciate a nod to the original (and it's good for you, too, so people will understand what you're referring to!) - but the blatant thefts are close relatives and much worse. (This is why I hate the Huffington Post with such vitriol.) Given the ease of HTML linking, you'd think there would be more of a culture of attribution.

Bee said...

That was a nice dunk, hey dude follow my blog too, I like yours. Do you think Lebron will be going to the NY Knicks?