List of Internet phenomena

An Internet phenomenon (sometimes called an Internet meme) occurs when something relatively unknown becomes increasingly popular, often quite suddenly, through the mass propagation of media content made feasible by the Internet; however, the popularity of the phenomenon usually wanes as rapidly as it was acquired: 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. It is nearly impossible to accurately measure the depth of a phenomenon's popularity, and different groups of Internet users may participate in spreading the phenomenon more than others. Some people point to these sort of Internet phenomena as good examples of memes, or neta. In William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition an interesting kind of Internet phenomenon—"the footage"—plays an important role.

Internet phenomena include:

People

• Danni Ashe
• Danny Aquino, allegedly stole a camera phone from a car on Long Island, New York. After taking pictures of himself and his girlfriend with the phone the pictures have become fodder for Photoshopping.
• Keyra Augustina
• 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
• Libby Hoeler
• William Hung - A Chinese college student at UC Berkeley who auditioned for the 2004 series of American Idol and had already been laughed at on TV rose to even more fame through the Internet with his audition getting more widespread exposure as well as remix
• Cindy Margolis
• Andy Milonakis - A man in his late 20s with the appearance and voice of a 14 year old boy via a growth hormone defect, who rose to fame after releasing home webcam recordings of freestyle raps, silly and funny videos, and short films (such as the "Crispy New Freestyle" and "The Superbowl Is Gay") on the Internet. He even has his own MTV show now.
• Brian Peppers, a physically deformed sex offender.
• Jennifer Ringley - Created the website, Jennicam, in which people could watch her via webcam and had her own internet program, "The Jenni Show".
• The Star Wars Kid - a video digitally edited numerous times of a Québecois teenager (Ghyslain Raza) pretending to be Darth Maul

Videos

• Bad Day - a man takes out his rage on his computer.
• 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
• "Call On Me" by Eric Prydz has had a popular video featuring a male in a female aerobics class, along with many spoofs. [1] The most famous spoof features a female in a male Naval aerobics class. [2]
• Chin2 - supposedly Korean kids dancing topless in front of a mirror
• Elektronik Supersonik - An allegedly Eastern European pop song and music video, featured on the Molvania website. A hilarious parody of Eastern European pop culture.
• Exploding dog (video) - A four-second video of a Norwich Terrier suddenly disappearing with a flash of smoke, obviously faked (the camera clearly cuts to a stuffed animal being blown up with a firecracker). A version can be viewed here.
• Exploding whale - an old news story thought myth gets a second following with the postage of a news footage video.
• Fan films - especially for Star Wars.[3] Fanfilms range from simple backyard antics to professional looking films such as "Duality" [4]
• Is This The Way To Armadillo - spoof music video of Peter Kay's version of "Is This the Way to Amarillo" made by UK troops stationed in Iraq. Link to video here.
• John Daker - a singer who makes up for his lack of ability and his unusual voice with bizarre facial expressions.
• Leeroy Jenkins - the dangers of going AFK in World of Warcraft. Link to video here.
• Numa Numa - an overly enthusiastic kid (Gary Brolsma) singing along to a Romanian-language dance song ("Dragostea Din Tei" by O-ZONE) See it here on Newgrounds.com
• Prophet Yahweh - video[5] of the prophet supposedly summoning UFOs, was widely circulated on the internet in June of 2005.
• Rubber Johnny - a short film by music video director Chris Cunningham, accompanied by music from Aphex Twin, which was thought by some to depict an actual mutant teenager in a wheelchair when excerpts from it began appearing on the internet Link to Video here.
• Stealth Disco - Videos of people rocking out behind unknowing victims.
• Video Game Pianist - Piano player who plays both old and new video games' themes. Formerly called "The Blindfolded Pianist"

Animation-based

• Animutations - simple animations usually containing foriegn music and pop-culture references. The fad first gained widespread popularity with "Hyakugojyuuichi".
• Badger Badger Badger - a repetitive animation about Badgers
• Bananaphone - various animations with the song "Banana Phone" by Raffi Cavoukian, where the first and most widespread features Osaka with a "Gundam Bananaphone"
• Dancing baby - a 3D-rendered dancing baby. First appeared in 1997 and became something of a late '90s cultural icon.
• Dancing Banana - an animated icon that became famous after being adapted in an animation with the song "Peanut Butter Jelly Time".
• The Demented Cartoon Movie [6]
• The End of the World - a flash animation using Group X-style voices.[7]
• Group X - makers of the songs "Bang Bang Bang", "SchfiftyFive" and a parody of the "Mario Twins" A version of the Super Mario Bros. theme by Group X, adapted into Flash video.
• Hamster Dance - a page filled with animated GIFs of hamsters dancing, linking to other animated pages. It now has its own CD.
• Happy Tree Friends - a series featuring cute animals that meet violent ends
• Homestar Runner - an online series that also features a popular "Strong Bad Emails" in which viewers can email one of the main characters, to which he wittily responds.
• 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 ninja.
• JibJab [8] - a Web site featuring many cartoons including those that satirize the 2004 Presidential Election
• Madness Combat - A highly violent series.
• Magical Trevor - A flash cartoon about a magician.
• Neurotically Yours - a series featuring a Goth and her pet squirrel
• Prank flashs - flash animations that tend to catch people off guard. They can be heart jumping "screamers" or just simply annoying flashes such as "You Are An Idiot".
• 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
• Retarded Animal Babies - an obscene flash series about the vice-filled lives of various pet animals
• Salad Fingers - a series featuring an odd character in a strange and creepy world
• There she is!! - a Korean series about a girl rabbit that fell in love with a cat
• We Drink Ritalin - an animutation
• Weebl and Bob - a series about two egg shaped friends
• Weeeeee! (Gonads and Strife)
• 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 [9] - operating systems personified as cute mascots by various Japanese artists

Images

• Bert is Evil - Photoshopped pictures placing the Muppet Bert with questionable people and situations
• Boilerplate
• Bonsai Kitten
• Clock Spider - who "ate" a clock and fought Limecat
• Dog poop girl - a woman's dog relieves itself on a subway car floor and she refuses to clean it up; the Internet hears about it and punishes her
• Every time you masturbate... God kills a kitten
• Fatmouse - a large mouse with large ambitions
• HA! HA! guy - a customizable image of a laughing Quaker minister
• Icy Hot Stuntaz
• Image macros - Pictures with superimposed text used in discussions. Common accompanying texts include "Owned", "STFU", and "O RLY"/"YA RLY" (usually with an owl).
• Limecat - a cat with a lime on its head (a.k.a. Meloncat)
• 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.
• Mustard Man - picture of a supposed fast food employee dropping the mustard
• 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

Websites

• 4chan [10]- image boards, discussion boards, oekaki, meme.
• B3TA [11] - with an extremely popular humorous link based newsletter and plenty of shopped user submitted images.
• eBay auctions that are unusual, such as the 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich with a supposed semblance to the Virgin Mary
• Emotion Eric - a person that makes various emotional expressions by request
• Kate's playground - An adult site where porn star "Kate" reportedly has a deformation of her left foot.
• Neurocam - [12], art project / social experiment / life role play /mysterious unknown
• Ninja Burger - ninja who deliver fast food
• Webcomics - various comics and their characters have gained large followings. They come in multiple formats ranging from hand drawn illustrations to sprite comics
• YTMND - a simple humorous website becomes a template for thousands of similar sites and many sub-memes.
• Zombo.com - parodies the dot-com boom

Shock sites

• Goatse.cx, Lemonparty & Tubgirl (now offline), are shock sites frequently linked from Internet forums and IRC channels

Personal sites

• 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.
• Hello My Future Girlfriend [13]
• Mahir Cagri - personal website of a Turkish man; has received mass adoration by fans, mainly for its overly enthusiastic text.

Political sites

• Black World Wide Web protest - Thousands of webpages turned black for 48 hours to protest the Communications Decency Act
• Blue Ribbon Campaign - Many webpages have linked to a blue ribbon image from EFF to raise awareness to laws that may affect online freedom of speech.
• First United Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - parody religion set up to satirize intelligent design.

Fan sites

• Real Ultimate Power - devoted to ninjas
• The WFJF - devoted to the sport of finger jousting [14]

Blogs

• Furong JieJie - A freespirit Chinese blogger
• Mu Zimei - A Chinese woman that wrote about her sexual encounters. She is credited to start a new sexual revolution in an otherwise suppressed China
• PostSecret - An ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on homemade postcards. [15]
• Rachelle Waterman - The blog of a teenage girl who wrote "just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered," and was arrested shortly thereafter. Over 5,000 comments in her LiveJournal blog, before it was deleted. Mirrors still exist.
• Tard Blog
• Tucker Max - Millions of hits as well as a cult following to a "man's man," whose skill with alcohol, women, and witty insults is "supposedly" unmatched.

Audio

• The "Crazy Frog" ringtone/"The Annoying Thing" video which originated as a sound file spread on the Internet and used in Insanity Tests
• Jared: Butcher of Song
• Kerpal - "You kicked my dog!" prank call
• MC Hawking - a text-to-speech rapper based off Stephen Hawking
• Schnappi das kleine Krokodil - a song about a crocodile sung by a very young German girl, where its huge commercial success would not have been possible without P2P networks.
• Tai Mai Shu - an Asian freestyle rapper
• ThunderCats outtakes
• WRYYYYYY - An eerie sound taken from an anime called Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and put into a strange flash.
• Yatta - a song by the fig leaf wearing group Happa-tai that was also made into the animutation "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. An example of engrish.
• Bash.org - A collection of online IRC chat logs at bash.org.
• Densha Otoko - online postings about a man who meets someone by saving her on a train, which was later adapted into a comic book and TV-movie.
• First post, participants strive to be the first person to add a comment (post) to a new article or discussion thread.
• 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 - a Japanese construction company's advert about "growing"
• Gay Fuel - a drink for an alternate lifestyle
• The Spongmonkeys- bizarre creatures that sing, later used to advertise for Quiznos
• The Subservient Chicken- a Burger King promotional website that features a "live" chicken that can obey thousands of typed commands
• Whazzup? [16] - Budweiser commercial series that took a new life when it was parodied with the SuperFriends [17] and Elián Wazzup [18] (which was also inspired by the Elián González debacle).

See also

• fad