use this approach to account for how YouTube itself works as a cultural system. Attempting to address the missing middle between large-scale quantitative analysis and the sensitivity of qualitative methods, the study discussed combined the close reading of media and cultural studies with a survey of 4,320 of the videos calculated to be 'most popular' on the website at a particular moment -- gathered between August and November 2007. This paper discusses the research approach and attendant challenges, as well as opportunities for understanding dynamic co-created cultural systems. Knowledge Everywhere: The Distributed Memory of Social Media , Alexander Halavais We know almost nothing about the college years of our 43rd president. We know that George Bush attended Yale University, was a cheerleader, played rugby, and did not excel as a student. Compare that with what we will know about our 49th president. It is very likely she will have a Facebook profile. She may have had a blog. Chances are good that her emails to friends, colleagues, teachers, and lovers will all be preserved, not in a centralized archive, but in the distributed memory of the web. As knowledge creation more closely resembles a tapestry woven by a crowd than an organized warehouse, creating an archive -- a distributed memory -- necessarily requires new strategies. An examination of some of the theoretical concerns (fidelity, privacy, selection) provides a framework to understand existing technologies that enable archiving, and suggests practical, incremental steps toward exploiting these opportunities to provide for a democratic,