Internet phenomenon

An Internet phenomenon is akin to a fad, in which something relatively unknown becomes increasingly popular, but usually for a short duration of time. It is nearly impossible to accurately measure the depth of a phenomenon's popularity, and different groups of the Internet may participate more than others. The Internet's lack of physical boundaries leads to a much faster and wider spread of information and ideas, especially when the subject is based around humor or curiosity. Some point to this sort of Internet phenomena as good examples of memes. In literature, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition an interesting kind of Internet phenomenon — "the footage" — plays an important role.

Internet phenomena include:

Videos

• Bad Day — a man takes out his rage on his computer.
• Bill Gates gets a pie in the face
• Bubb Rubb — a man who rose to fame thanks to a humorous local TV broadcast where he was interviewed on the topic of whistle tips
• Chin2 — supposedly Korean kids dancing topless in front of a mirror
• Ellen Feiss — a teenage girl featured in an Apple Computer advertisement, whose slurred speech and disoriented eyes provoked speculation that she was under the influence of illicit drugs
• Exploding whale — an old news story thought myth gets a second following with the postage of a news footage video.
• Numanuma — an overweight kid (Gary Brolsma) singing along to a Romanian techno song
• The Star Wars Kid — a video digitally edited numerous times of a Quebecois teenager pretending to be Darth Maul
• Video Game Pianist — Extremely talented piano player who plays both old and new video games' themes. Formerly called "The Blindfolded Pianist"

Animation-based

• Absurdist Flash animations such as "The Demented Cartoon Movie" [1] and "Madness"
• Animutations
• Badger Badger Badger
• Bananaphone
• Dancing baby — a 3D-rendered dancing baby.
• The End of the World — a flash animation using Group X-style voices.[2]
• How to Kill a Mockingbird — A parody of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird that quickly deviates into a fantasy about pirates, dinosaurs, robots, and ninjas.
• Group X — makers of the songs Bang Bang Bang and SchfiftyFive, adapted into Flash
• The Hamster Dance — a page filled with animated GIFs of hamsters, linking to other animated pages. It now has its own CD soundtrack.
• Happy Tree Friends — a series featuring cute animals that meet violent ends
• Homestar Runner
• JibJab [3] — a Web site featuring many cartoons including those that satirize the 2004 Presidential Election
• Neurotically Yours — a series featuring a goth and her pet squirrel
• Peanut Butter Jelly Time — A dancing banana singing about peanut butter and jelly.
• Red vs Blue — a popular machinima using the Microsoft Halo video game engine. A popular, fan-created outgrowth is Sponsors vs Freeloaders
• Rejected — a story of an animator and the effects of rejection
• Salad Fingers
• Weebl and Bob
• Xiao Xiao — a set of stick figure action animations. Xiao Xiao #3 was particularly popular

Anime

• Nevada-tan — an imageboard meme featuring CG artwork of a Japanese schoolgirl who murdered her classmate
• OS-tan [4] — operating systems personified as cute mascots by various Japanese artists

Photos

• Bert is Evil — photoshopped pictures placing the muppet Bert with questionable people and situations
• Boilerplate
• Bonsai Kitten
• Ceciliantas — an EverQuest II player whose "cybering" was revealed by screenshots from an invisible player in the same room
• Clock Spider — who "ate" a clock and fought Limecat
• Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten
• Fatmouse — a large mouse with large ambitions
• Hopkin green frog
• Limecat — a cat with a lime on its head
• Moshzilla — a girl moshing at a show
• Mr. T Ate My Balls — a Yahoo! site with images of Mr. T, captioned with various absurd and questionable statements. Repeatedly done with other subjects, both fictional and non-fictional. Spawned an entire Yahoo! category under Tasteless Humor → Ate My Balls.
• Oolong the Rabbit — a Japanese rabbit whose owner placed various objects on top of its head(the most well-known being pancakes) and then posted pictures. Also known as Pancakebunny
• Tourist guy (http://www.touristofdeath.com) — the same person photoshopped into photos of different events, mostly disasters
• Tubcat — a very fat cat

Shock sites

• Goatse.cx — a shock site frequently linked from Internet forums and IRC channels.
• Lemonparty — a shock site frequently linked from Internet forums and IRC channels.
• Tubgirl — a shock site frequently linked from Internet forums and IRC channels.

Websites

• Bizzare eBay auctions, such as the 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich with a supposed semblance to the Virgin Mary
• Emotion Eric
• Neurocam — neurocam.com, art project / social experiment / life role play /mysterious unknown
• Ninja Burger — ninjas who deliver fast food
• Wikipedia
• Zombo.com — parodies the dot-com boom

Personal sites

• Hello My Future Girlfriend [5]
• Mahir Cagri — personal website of a Turkish man; has received mass adoration by fans, mainly for its overly enthusiastic text.

Fan sites

• Big Trouble in Little China — devoted to the best movie Jack Burton ever starred in.
• Real Ultimate Power — devoted to ninjas

Blogs

• The Best Page in the Universe — 100 000 000+ visits to a website operated by a pirate. The individual articles from this site often spread memetically.
• Currently Stationary — The original Engrish cult classic
• Rachelle Waterman — "Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered." Over 5,000 comments in her LiveJournal blog

Audio

• Kerpal — "You kicked my dog!" prank call
• Jared: Butcher of Song
• MC Hawking
• Tai Mai Shu
• Yatta — a song by the fig-leaf wearing group Happa-tai that was also made into the flash animation "Irrational Exuberance."

Text-based

• All your base are belong to us — a phrase from the English translation of the video game Zero Wing, which later was adapted into a popular Flash animation.
• First post, participants strive to be the first person to add a comment (post) to a new article or discussion thread.
• Kurt Vonnegut's supposed 1997 "wear sunscreen" commencement address at MIT, widely circulated on the Internet. In fact, the commencement speaker at MIT in 1997 was Kofi Annan and the putative Vonnegut speech was an article published in the Chicago Tribune on June 1, 1997 by columnist Mary Schmich.
• Leet speak and AOL speak may also be considered forms of memetic Internet phenomenon.
• There Is No Cabal — a phrase used on Usenet.
• Timecube The profound yet incoherent rantings of a schizophrenic philosopher.

Advertising

• Anabukinchan
• The Spongmonkeys
• The Subservient Chicken
• Whazzup? [6] — Budweiser commercial series that took a new life when it was parodied with the SuperFriends [7]

Uncategorized

See also

• Clichés on the Internet