I’ve always hated virals, the kind of things you get in emails that are supposed to be funny, or even worse half-arsed Flash animations created to promote a product, filled with as much imagination as, er, well, not much… Splat the Bimbo, Splat the MP, Splat the TV Presenter. Like the idiot who, after the success of the $1million web page thought that a $10million web page was a good idea…

Every now and again of course a good one comes along, one worth spreading (like compost) … say the Wonderbra Gorilla drummer girl one, but despite it being mildly amusing for approximately two whole minutes, it doesn’t make up for the other 99.999% (read ‘em… five nines!) of woeful dross.

What I hate most about virals is:

1. They don’t work but I’m sure some idiot in Clerkenwell has stats to prove they do
2. Some idiot in Clerkenwell got paid really money to create it. Can you tell that this one gets me most.
3. They are hardly ever even slightly funny
4. I don’t like them.

.. And so Kevin, in How not to be viral says…

If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system

…and goes on to list ways of reproducing… so to speak, that include…

• r-Strategy: Lots of seeds
• K-strategy: Nuturing young
• Fruiting: Delicious with a seed in it
• Rhizomatic: Grassroot growth

…which sort of makes sense, but I’d really like examples of each to help me better understand. For example, is blogging r-Strategy or Rhizomatic? Was Flickr a K-Strategy? Apple has to be a Fruiting strategy doesn’t it? And what is an example of Rhizomatic? RSS aggregators maybe… not sure. I like what he’s doing, providing an alternative to Viral and think I agree but I need a bit more flesh on the bones. I guess some examples won’t be products, but will me memes along the line of “sharing statuses” … that cross propogation types… like a hot discussion across many (some connected, some not) blogs.

By the way, I’ve always hated the Rhizome metaphor when talking about hypermedia. Maybe it’s my mildly agricultural upbringing but the way tubers grow or strawberries send out shoots are actually nothing like a network, although strawberries do end up all tangled together much like a router rack. Real world distances, say between a strawberry plant at one side of the field and another at the other just don’t apply to a network. Rhizomes don’t reconnect with their siblings, parents etc the way networks do, lattice-like.

The thing is, I think there isn’t a natural analogy for networks that is a good fit, they’re a new, new thing.

There. Glad to have cleared that one up. The internet isn’t strawberries.