Name	Fark
Logo
Screenshot
Caption	The Fark homepage on April 25, 2007
Url	http://www.fark.com/
Commercial	Yes
Type	News Aggregator
Language	English
Registration	Required to post (free)
Owner	Drew Curtis
Launch date	1999
Alexa	2,310
Current status	active

Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites. The site receives approximately 2,000 story submissions per day and approximately 50 of them are publicly displayed on the site.

The site is frequently used as a humorous source for news by radio stations, as well as most late night comedy shows. Founder Drew Curtis says the stories are selected without intentional political bias, but that he rather tries to run both far-left and far-right articles.

Links are submitted by Fark members (collectively referred to as "Farkers"), which admins can approve ("greenlight") for posting on either the main page or one of the subsidiary tab pages. All links, whether approved or not, have associated threads where users can comment on the link. Greenlit links can generate upwards of 300,000 page views in one month for the recipient. This can generate such an enormous amount of traffic in such a short a time that smaller websites are often rendered inoperable due to congestion or simple server failure. This is colloquially referred to as the website being "farked" by the community.

History

Fark was created in 1999 by Drew Curtis of Lexington, Kentucky. Curtis states that the word "fark" originated either from a chat room euphemism for a popular four-letter obscenity, or from a drunken misspelling; although he tells people it is the former because it is a "better story that way". He registered Fark.com in September 1997, when a friend mentioned that all of the four letter domain names were disappearing. Originally, Fark contained no content except for an image of a squirrel with large testicles. This photograph is that of a Cape Ground Squirrel in Etosha National Park, Namibia, taken by photographer Kevin Shafer, who at the time worked for the Corbis Corporation, ca. 1993.

Since 1993, Curtis had frequently read morning news stories and exchanged them with friends. Although this would later become the inspiration for Fark, Curtis toyed with the idea of starting an online curry recipe database. The first story posted was an article about a fighter pilot who crashed while attempting to moon another fighter pilot. Features such as link submission and forums were added as popularity and participation grew. By January 2008, according to Curtis, the site was averaging an estimated 52 million page views per month from 4 million unique visitors.

While most of the story links on the main page are submitted by users and selected for placement based on merit, there was an incident in August 2004 in which Fark was accused of selling preferential placement of story links on the main page. The accusation stemmed from an exchange between Mahalo.com CEO Jason Calacanis and third party sales employee Gogi Gupta, where Gupta claimed Calacanis could buy an editorial on Fark for $300 to $400. Curtis dismissed the incident as the result of an overenthusiastic salesperson, and subsequently fired Gupta. Gupta worked for a company called Gupta Media and did not have the authority to speak for Fark, according to Curtis. Customers could purchase NSFW links through Foobies at the price of $400 per link.

Fark launched Fark TV on January 17, 2007. The first video was a spoof ad for a mock product called "Meth Coffee."

A new design for the website was launched on April 25, 2007, with the comment, "Fark site redesign is now live. Hope nothing breaks, we're all out drinking." The new design was initially received with some controversy by many users, mostly due to the change in layout and a seemingly indifferent attitude by site moderators to user impact or feedback. In response, Drew Curtis noted the following reasons for the redesign: "Websites have to evolve over time. Otherwise you end up with a layout anachronism like the Drudge Report. The old design was put into place years ago, over time changes were nailed on to the design like loose shingles on a leaky roof. It was time to reformat and remove a bunch of the clutter while trying to keep the core design intact." The site layout was refined over the next few weeks in accordance with many suggestions.

Curtis published the book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass off Crap as News in May 2007. The book critically explores the mass media industry and the go-to stories used when there is a lack of hard news to report. Despite its initial strong reception, the book only received mild attention from reviewers. Salon.com gave it a favorable review, although the only major newspaper to review it was the Tucson Citizen, which only gave it a mini-review.

On November 24, 2009, Fark launched a new partnership with USA Today, as they became the exclusive host and sponsor of Fark's Geek Page, a collection of technology-related links. This represents the site's first content partnership with a major media brand. Previously, Curtis had signed a sales only deal with Maxim Online. The page shows aggregated technology news headlines from other news sources with USA Today's Tech section branding. Its right column displays technology content from USA Today with video clips and a headline widget of USAToday.com's Tech Live and Game Hunters stories.

Administration

Compared to other popular websites, such as Daily Kos and del.icio.us, Fark is a relatively small operation, run more or less singlehandedly by founder Drew Curtis from his home in Lexington, Kentucky. The site earns revenue from advertising and membership in its TotalFark program. Although Curtis won't release official revenue figures, he estimated that, in 2006, the site earned just under $600,000 per year. Similarly, articles discussing Wil Wheaton – a Fark user himself – are given the Wheaton tag and articles discussing Christopher Walken are occasionally given the Walken tag, though Walken has never participated on Fark.

On August 19, 2008, a new fail tag was introduced, to be used for submitted articles where the subject does something ignorant or when a major gaffe occurs. A new Caturday tag was introduced to in recognition of the caturday meme on December 21, 2009.

TotalFark

In February 2002, Curtis introduced TotalFark as a subscription service, charging $5 per month. By May 2007 there were an estimated 2,000 subscribers, generating $120,000 per year.

Farkisms and clichés

sign|alt=This is an image of the Adopt-a-Highway sign that was erected in Tennessee in April 2006 to highlight the UFIA (Unsolicited Finger In Anus) cliché]] Fark's comment threads are often littered with various Farkisms or clichés. These are essentially in-jokes which either originated on Fark or on other sites (such as 4chan or Something Awful) that have become an integral part of the community culture and used in myriad discussions in the forums, regardless of whether they apply to the topic at hand. Several groups of people seem to take a bit more abuse than others on the site, including PETA, Catholic priests, the French, and Duke University, according to Curtis. The site has also become somewhat well known for including "NSFW" (Not Safe For Work) in the headlines of links that contain images or videos of a sensitive nature, and in 2007, attempted to file a trademark of the phrase. Fark was also involved in organizing the Rickrolling of the New York Mets in April 2008, when they encouraged readers to vote for Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up as the song to be played during every home game of the 2008 season.

One particularly notable Farkism involves the acronym UFIA (Unsolicited Finger In Anus), which became a cliché after an article making the main page misquoted a judge using the line. UFIA was prominently used again in February 2005, when Drew Curtis purchased the naming rights to the Fleet Center (now TD Garden) in Boston, Massachusetts for the single day of February 28, 2005. The consensus choice of Fark's readers was that it should be re-dubbed the "Fark.com UFIA Center". In the end, however, Boston Garden was chosen as the name due to obscenity concerns. In April 2006, a Fark member convinced the Tennessee Department of Transportation to erect an Adopt a Highway sign in the name of UFIA on the two miles of State Route 63 west of the intersection of SR 63 and U.S. Route 25E. The Department required a definition of UFIA, which was explained as, “Uniting Friends in America.” The sign remained up for a few days, but was ultimately removed once authorities were informed of the origins of the acronym.

Another popular Farkism involves KABC-TV Consumer Specialist Ric Romero, which began on October 19, 2005, when he wrote a news story on the "new" internet phenomenon of blogging. The story was then picked up by Fark, where he was ridiculed for posting a story about something that many people did not consider "news" and was actually quite obvious. Over the course of the next several years, he became somewhat of a meme on the site, as Farkers would post links to his stories, along with his photo, and a brief caption stating something obvious that everyone already knew. On December 7, 2009, Drew Curtis discovered his Facebook fan page, which led Ric to ask the Farkers that joined his new Facebook page to donate to the Spark of Love Toy Drive, which subsequently resulted in 582 online donations totaling $13,659.20 by December 16, 2009. Romero thanked the Fark community on the news for their donations, and recognized his status as a Farkism, also reporting the "breaking news" that "Water is Wet."

Photoshop contests

The site features regular Photoshop contests, in which users use a graphical editing program (such as Adobe Photoshop, from which the contest draws its name) to manipulate an image provided by the creator of the contest. The image is usually manipulated for humorous effect, but can also be edited to create an aesthetically-pleasing image or to showcase a poster's image manipulation skill. A similar site, Something Awful, sponsors Photoshop Phriday contests.

Fark Parties

At periodic intervals throughout the year, Fark Parties are organized, usually in conjunction with the travels of Curtis. The practice began in 1999, when Curtis was doing some database consulting in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Staying in a hotel with nothing to do, he posted a note up on the site asking anybody who lived in the area to email him if they wanted to join him for a beer.

Traffic and users

As of June 2009, the site receives approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it in the top 100 of English language websites. Fark's Alexa rating is 2,310, with the average user spending 5.8 minutes per day on the site and 5,337 sites linking in. 67.2% of users originate from the United States. The site receives approximately 2,000 story submissions per day from users, and approximately 50 of them are displayed on the main page of the site, or "green-lighted". There are around 500,000 user accounts on the site (including both TotalFark as well as unpaid accounts), although only about 5% actually read comments, and only 1% actually post in the forums.

Normally, in the absence of serious news, comments in the forums on the site tend to be of a more sophomoric nature, consisting primarily of sex jokes and comments about various bodily functions. However, during major events such as the September 11 attacks or the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, usage spikes and the site can actually be seen as a more serious outlet for news. In response to this coverage, Drew Curtis placed a green band on the letter "K" in the site's logo at the top of the page, to show support for Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

In a June 2009 interview, Curtis said that almost all traffic coming from the People's Republic of China and India was from spammers, so he blocked both countries from the site.

Publicity

As the site has gained in popularity, Fark has appeared numerous times in popular media outlets. In 2006, Curtis and Fark were featured on the cover of Business 2.0 magazine as part of the feature story about successful websites. In 2007 and 2009, Fark was referenced on the game show Jeopardy!, with a category entitled "Fark.com Headlines." The site is also frequently used as a humorous source for news by many radio stations, as well as late night comedy shows. Although much to Drew Curtis' dismay, it is very rarely cited as a source for many of these stories. Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage, science fiction author John Scalzi, and actor Wil Wheaton.

See also

News aggregator

Digg

Reddit

Slashdot

Something Awful

Worth1000

References

External links

Official website

FARK.ru – Independently-run Russian language site modeled after FARK.com

Farktography – site for Fark photography (not Photoshop) contests

Fark Photoshop Scrutinizer – Fark Photoshop contest results and statistics

Category:Comedy websites Category:Community websites Category:Internet properties established in 1999 Category:Virtual communities Category:Web 2.0

Jade Seah (Simplified Chinese: 谢美玉) (born April 6, 1983) is a Singaporean model, host and actress. Jade was 1st runner-up at the Miss Singapore Universe 2006 pageant, who signed a contract with MediaCorp soon after the pageant. A graduate of Singapore Management University, Jade is now the new face of Nivea Visage. She was a host in the Singaporean reality television show, The Dance Floor, with co-hosts Glenn Ong and Mark Van Cuylenberg (The Flying Dutchman). Jade has both Chinese and Eurasian parentage. She is the only daughter in her family, with 2 brothers. She had reported in Today in Beijing on Channel 5, on the day's highlights of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Controversy

While hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics' program Today in Beijing on Channel 5, Seah was reportedly said to have uttered a profanity after pronouncing the name of a Chinese athlete wrong. The scene has shifted from the studio to a recorded clip of a basketball match when the vulgarity was heard. The scene was recorded and uploaded to YouTube. It has led to plenty of discussions on online forums, blogs and also on Facebook. However, her artiste manager has denied that Seah had utter any profanity and MediaCorp has confirmed this.

However, the next day, Mr Kenneth Liang, executive vice-president (TV Programming & Production, Channel 5), MediaCorp TV confirms that Seah has uttered the profanity unintentionally. The microphone was not switched off after her lines were delivered which led to her reaction over the fluff being captured on the program. Seah will not be replaced as the co-host of Today in Beijing. In a statement from Channel 5, Seah apologised for the profanity uttered and explained her over-reaction.

Filmography

Rated:E, as a roving reporter

The Dance Floor, as a host

Sweets for my Sweet

Beach.Ball.Babes

Sports@SG

First Class

References

External links

Jade Seah in the Singapore Celebrity Photo Gallery

The Dance Floor

Miss Singapore Universe 2006

Miss Singapore Universe 2006 finals

Category:Singaporean people of European descent Category:Singaporean people of Chinese descent Category:Singaporean television actors Category:Singaporean female models Category:Living people Category:1983 births

Name	Drew Curtis
Caption	Drew Curtis
Birth date	February 07, 1973
Birth place	Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.
Nationality	American
Years active	1993—present
Occupation	Publisher
Website	http://www.fark.com
Known for	Founder of Fark.com
Partner	Heather
Name	Curtis, Drew
Date of birth	February 7, 1973
Place of birth	Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.

Category:1973 births Category:Living people Category:People from Lexington, Kentucky Category:American Internet personalities Category:American online publication editors Category:American social sciences writers