Valleywag: rickroll

No costume? No problem

Adriana Nunez — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:00:00 PDT

Some readers have told us our Halloween masks were a little too frightening. If you're still scrambling to pull together a costume, here are four options that are more treat than trick. Best of all, you'll be able to get what you need from your own closet.

What to wear: Khaki jacket and black turtleneck
Who you are: Rick Astley
How to play the part: Memorize "Never Gonna Give You Up." You'll be singing it all night.

What to wear: Shower cap, towel, iPhone
Who you are: "Naked Conversations" author Robert Scoble
How to play the part: Engage everyone in conversation. Ask them if they want to get naked. Hope they don't take you up on it.

What to wear: Three-piece suit
Who you are: Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore
How to play the part: Make sure you have a girl on each arm. Tell everyone you're a blogger. Refuse to explain what you actually do.

What to wear: Jumpsuits and aviator glasses for two
Who you are: Larry Page and Sergey Brin
How to play it: Maverick and Goose? So old media. With a fighter jet parked at Moffett Field, Larry and Sergey are the Valley's new Top Guns.

MTV Music too little, too late -- except for one thing

Owen Thomas — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:20:00 PDT

Imagine a website where you can view every music video known to man. Yes, that's what MTV.com should have been 10 years ago. Now that MTVmusic.com exists, what is it good for? Oh yes: A whole new way to rickroll your friends.

Barack Obama rickrolls John McCain and the Republican National Convention

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:00:00 PDT

With its joke-killing April Fool's prank, YouTube took all the fun out of rickrolling forever. But someone has successfully revived the gag, where you trick someone into clicking on a link to Rick Astley's '80s one-hit wonder, "Never Gonna Give You Up." YouTube users Hugh Atkin and Alastair Corrigall edited together excerpts from old Obama speeches to create the illusion that he's actually singing Astley's song to John McCain and the delegates at the Republican National Convention. Rickrolling has always been a dumb, easy prank. Atkin and Corrigall turned it into a smart one. Watch the clip:

Rickroll the vote!

Melissa Gira Grant — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:20:00 PDT

Sean Tevis: he's from the Internet, but he's only running for representative of a small part of it — District 15 in Olathe, Kansas. Why limit his donors to just the people he'll represent, when really, this election is all about Open Government and Transparency? "It's Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner" is Tevis's fundraising webcomic. Admit it. If you donate the $8.34 Tevis asks for, you're just voting for him because he rickrolled you.

The Olds' guide to 4chan, the world's most obscene trendspotting site

Paul Boutin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:20:00 PDT

Both Time and the Wall Street Journal have run articles in the past 24 hours about 4chan, the dirty little secret site that spawns many a Web fad — LOLcats and rickrolling among them. But you don't want to start surfing 4chan yourself. It's full of sophomoric poor-taste-on-purpose posts like the above image. Moreover, posts on 4chan rarely live more than an hour. They're automatically pulled once their comment threads go idle, rather than archived. Let the kids filter it for you. Anything really good on 4chan will turn up on your screen from somewhere else.

Excerpted from Time:

You may not realize it, but 4chan has probably touched your life. Possibly inappropriately. 4chan is unusual in several ways. It's extremely large and active; it gets 8.5 million page views a day and 3.3 million visitors a month. Since moot started it in 2003, those visitors have put up 145 million posts. By some metrics, 4chan is the fourth largest bulletin board on the Net.

4chan is also very profane. A phrase from Star Wars comes to mind: It's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Spammers don't even bother to spam 4chan; Google started searching it only six months ago. But it is the wellspring from which a lot of Internet culture, and hence popular culture, bubbles. In his way, moot is one of the most powerful people on the Web.

The Wall Street Journal's report. Note to Olds: Correct usage is "rickroll," not "Rick Roll," but rickrolling is already over. Stick to LOLcats — those will be around forever.

After appearing on the site, "LOLcats," humorous images of cats with loud text beneath them in a fake language called "LOLspeak", stormed the Web last year. (For example, instead of saying "hello," the cats would say "oh hai.") Another phrase "So I herd u like mudkips," a reference to a sea creature from the popular animated show "Pokémon," spawned thousands of tribute videos on YouTube. 4chan.org began as a simple message board with pictures and text. It was started by Christopher Poole in his Long Island bedroom in 2003 when he was 15 years old. Since then it has grown to more than 3 million monthly users, according to Mr. Poole.

One of the site's most popular memes is an online bait-and-switch known as the "Rick Roll."

Cisco never going to give you up, never going to let you down

Owen Thomas — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:20:00 PDT

I've always suspected vast swaths of Cisco, the boringly profitable networking giant, were stuck in the '90s. An exchange forwarded from an internal mailing list confirms it. First of all: forwarded from an internal mailing list. Haven't these people heard of wikis? Second of all: They're complaining about files being deleted from an internal FTP server. Hello, isn't storage supposed to be in the cloud? The email chain ends with equally dated complaints about misuse of the "reply all" button.

Finally, Ciscoid Donald Sharp introduces a slightly modern touch: A "rickroll," or pointer to a Rick Astley music video on YouTube. Alas, rickrolling went out of style in April. It's probably a novelty on the Cisco campus. If the 4,000 recipients of the mailing list watched all 3 minutes and 31 seconds of the video, we estimate they collectively wasted an entire person-month of shareholder-paid time. The thoroughly pointless email exchange:

'80s pop star plans to Rickroll England in eight arena gigs

Nicholas Carlson — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:40:00 PDT

Yes, Rick Astley, the reclusive British pop star responsible for "Never Gonna Give You Up," has himself been Rickrolled. But it's all been within the last six months, he told the Los Angeles Times. In fact, Astley didn't know about Rickrolling — the act of labeling a link to a YouTube video of his one hit song as something else — until last year. Now he's finally prepared to capitalize on the Web phenomenon with an eight-show 1980s reunion tour planned for England.

Rickroll delivered via singing telegram

Jackson West — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:40:17 PDT

Game, set and match goes to Rocketboom producer Kenyatta Cheese: He paid to send a singing-telegram messenger to deliver Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," live, to NextNewNetworks cofounder Timothy Shea. Rickrolling, a common online prank, normally involves tricking someone into following a link to the Astley video. Cheese's reward? A "/golfclap" — a petty form of nonpraise used online — also delivered live, from Shea. And what have these far-seeing pioneers of a brave new medium proved? That Internet video can be used to provoke real-world action that results in yet more Internet video.