Erin writes:

The Huffington Post has taken plenty of flack for the way it games Google with its tricked-out, super search engine optimized pages. “Stories” on the news service like “What Time Does the Super Bowl Start?” come to mind.

Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of Huffington Post and CEO of Buzzfeed, said at PandoMonthly tonight in New York that he doesn’t care about SEO anymore. He views it as a broken system that optimizes for robots, not humans. And the reason The Huffington Post did that is that it was built in a time when the social Web wasn’t developed enough yet to support better, human-driven methods for distribution.

Twitter and Facebook are the front page for content now — people don’t go to homepages, content comes to them via social networks. “What’s exciting to me now is that there are these social platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and StumbleUpon. That means you can create something for humans, not for robots, and still build something massive,” he said.

The key to virality is simplicity.

Evolutionary biologist Dawkins defines memes as self-replicating units of transmission – an idea Peretti played off. ”In order for an idea to replicate it has to be simple enough for a friend to talk about it at a party,” he said. “It hit something deeply personal that ties in with people’s sense of identity.”

But he also said the memes he helped spread – which also include the faux-personal website BlackPeopleLoveUs.com – also touched people on a personal level. “There was a reason to talk about it. They were about relationships, they were about identity… It makes you think of another person [you] want to share it [with].”

Source: http://pandodaily.com/2012/09/19/buzzfeeds-jonah-peretti-going-viral-is-about-keeping-it-simple/

What will be the first University CS department, Sociology department, Psych department, I-School, J-School, Econ department, or Business school to offer a degree in "Memetic Engineering"?

My money is on Stanford. :)

Why people come to Buzzfeed: “You’re coming to Buzzfeed’s homepage not for yourself, but to find something to share with someone else.”

Source: http://pandodaily.com/2012/09/20/21-jonah-peretti-quotes-that-will-restore-your-faith-in-buzzfeed/

In addition to FB, Twitter, and Buzzfeed, I'm really loving Learni.st for the "human curation" factor. Farb Nivi really knocked it out of the park with this one.

This is the first I've heard of http://learni.st/ ...

Thanks, will check Learnist out!

You should. I've curated a ton of stuff--love it. It's fun. There is a lot by way of news, special interest, current trending topics, geopolitical/regional current events...awesome stuff and a ton of experts in there:)

The content is good but the UI makes my head hurt.

Pinterest-style layout is not good for all content.

I'd expect better from a company that raised $25 million.

One of my roles in life is high school teacher (also have an expanding business. Fitness). This was the first year I had any computers, and my teacher computer was given to me by Moses. That part's true. It's worked like a charm in the classroom because if I curate stuff kids will read it. Now, they're actually asking if they can curate. I tweet the links, and they respond--they're actually fighting to do other class's work (I use one twitter handle w 3 class hashtags), which is amazing to me in general...

What would you do diff w the UI/flow, etc...? I get tired of the reddit-style listieness, which is why I liked the Pinterest feel (although I'm pretty much a lurker on Pinterest).

Dawn, cool.

Reddit listieness and Pinterest boardiness both require LOTS of scanning.

I'd prefer something more Tumblr-y -- a few, selected posts, presented linearly.

Makes sense--I am not as linear a person:) But I haven't gotten into the Pinterest mode...I tried to do that when it came out--Put my "serious" stuff on there--green environment stuff, vertical world-saving urban gardening... I wanted a bit of depth of material. I keep trying to engage in Pinterest and look for deeper ways to use it, but maybe it's just supposed to be fun...

It's just supposed to be fun.

Example: top 10 Pinterest quotes

Well, I just looked at my page...it's pretty boring. But I did find an awesome recipe for mock barista stuff. That didn't make me feel like less of a power-feminist, though--the inference that I'd be making the coffee.