Splitsider

The Webby Awards are pretty stupid. Not that giving out awards for achievement on the internet is an inherently bad idea, but when in order to be considered for a nomination you need to pay a "submission fee" costing hundreds of dollars, it's tough to consider them even remotely relevant. I mean, look at the nominees in categories about web videos; they all come from big companies, such as Funny or Die, CollegeHumor, Broadway Video and The Onion (or from corporations such as Microsoft and Chipotle). Those folks put out great stuff, sure, but did they really have no competition at all from amateur groups? But very few [...]

Comedians are great on Twitter, sure, but there's something magical about the parody accounts with a built-in shelf life that pop up relatively often (see: @weboughtaz00). This way of making jokes is so new and unique to the medium, you can't help but love it. This one, which was started two nights ago, purports to be by Adele's ex-boyfriend. It probably won't be pumping out 15 jokes a day in 18 months, but man is it funny right now.

It's January 19th, 2012, and it's as good a day as any to catch up on the year's best live-action desk calendar. What will Jim say today, we wonder, our eyes lighting up with the endless possibilities blooming in the promise of the next 24 hours. Let's find out, together.

Auto Buds: From Delocated's Jon Glaser, Auto Buds are two cars of the same make, model, color, or as identical as possible, that are parked right next to each other or in close proximity.

Where is Randy Savage?: A collection of photos with randy savage ingeniously photo shopped into them.

Hungover Owls: Owls that look hungover.

Literally Unbelievable: People who mistake the onion headlines as real.

I’m not racist, but: People on social networking sites who start updates with 'im not racist, but…'

Cats who look like Ron Swanson: Self-explanatory.

In the ongoing battle to get Nielsen ratings to even somewhat resemble the reality of who's watching what television shows, a blow has been struck for verisimilitude! There's now a system in place to standardize ratings of television and online ads so that advertisers can actually compare who's getting their ads from which platform. While it may not make any immediate differences to ratings numbers, this new system will certainly mean more information – and when networks sometimes base their content decisions on only half the story (i.e., the live-TV-viewing half), more information is always a good thing.

It all began on December 12, 2011.

That's when "Shit Girls Say" was uploaded to YouTube and nearly broke the Internet when it was picked up by Reddit, the Huffington Post, and pretty much every other website, too. A month and a half later, it's racked up over 12 million views. "Shit Girls Say" began as a Twitter account created by Kyle Humphrey and Graydon Sheppard, before they, along with some help from Juliette Lewis, put together the 79-second video that almost instantly "changed" the Internet, for better or worse (worse). Ever since, hundreds of parodies have popped up online, ranging from the inevitable "Shit Black Girls [...]

If there were a trophy for "browser tab kept open longest," Infinite Drunk Ron Swanson would win it and then dance around drunkly with it.

Jim Norton took to the red carpet of the Grammys to ask stars from Steve Martin to Adele to hold up his non-nominated 2011 standup album Despicable and related merchandise onstage. It's a pretty funny idea, and it highlights the fact that you rarely see successful album or book releases from comedians these days without a high-profile promotional stunt behind them. It seems that it's barely even worth writing and releasing a funny book if you don't also have a great, original idea to promote it virally online.

Viral success on the internet is a strange phenomenon. Marketers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to create something people will share with their friends, only to be beaten time and time again by accidents and genuine ineptitude. That’s part of the fun of the web — halfway decent singers wallow in obscurity while Rebecca Black gets 20 million hits, and your meticulously edited Tweet will never be as funny as a horse avatar poorly hawking ebooks. The content we share the most is stuff we can have conversations about, especially when the conversation goes something like, “This is weird and terrible and hilarious and I can’t look [...]

We've all been there: you've ripped off your What Would Bobby Bottleservice Do? bracelet in a anabolic steroid-induced rage and now have no reference for how to function in normal society. Fortunately Nick Kroll's internet etiquette advice offers a tutorial on how real people interact via this grand series of tubes. "Don't take pictures of your private parts and send them around willy-nilly, because they will end up on the Internet," Kroll explains in Details. "Unless your boobs are really fantastic or your dick looks like fantastic boobs. In that case, send them around the Internet like a goddamn congressman." Try not to overdo the status updates, says [...]