Lazy Sunday < Lonely Island
Andy Samberg used to be funny, honest! Before Saturday Night Live had him recording "The Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia," his comedy group "The Lonely Island" made what is possibly the only truly funny white-man rap, "The Heist," which contains the epic line "Chamomile, motherfucker!" If you'd heard of Samberg before, it's probably because of The 'Bu, TLI's series for the indy comedy show Channel 101.

Rickroll < Duckroll
Rickrolling, the practice of sending someone a link that unexpectedly leads to the music video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up,' is just bland; it's the Internet equivalent of saying "What? Chicken butt." It's Goatse for people too cowardly for shock sites and too unoriginal to find their own random red herring. But the Rickroll's predecessor, the duckroll — sending a link to a photo of a duck with wheels — was actually unexpected and maybe a little funny.

Badger Badger Badger < Weebl and Bob
While the animation of badgers and mushrooms is cute, it's a simpler form of the absurd humor in the creator's Weebl and Bob series. The cartoons of these two egg-shaped characters with a pie fetish are an acquired taste, and by that I mean you can't complain that it's unfunny unless you waste nine hours watching every episode.

Hot or Not < Am I Hot
Every popular social site is stolen from another. Friendster is a ripoff of Ryze.com; Facebook was ripped off from like fifty Harvard projects. Hot or Not changed its name from "Am I Hot or Not" because of threats from an older site called "Am I Hot," which the newer site's owners bought three years later, once they'd made tons of money through ads and a delicously shallow dating service. However "Am I Hot" was, the sheer volume of traffic, the reduction of every score to a 7.3, and the Facebook app make Hot or Not worse.

Ask a Ninja < Real Ultimate Power and Homestar Runner
I like Ask a Ninja. I mean kudos to them for being more than the same joke over and over. But asking a ninja for advice is just a combo of the pure ninja-fetish fun of "Real Ultimate Power" and the Strong Bad E-mails from Homestar Runner. No comedy advice series comes anywhere close to Strong Bad's growly cartoons.

Chuck Norris Facts < Vin Diesel Facts
The joke just makes more sense with Vin Diesel, because it's not so desperately ironic and catch-phrasey, so joke writers can revel in actual creativity. Compare:
"Apple pays Chuck Norris 99 cents every time he listens to a song."
"When Vin Diesel goes to donate blood, he declines the syringe, and instead requests a hand gun and a bucket."
If you've seen the gun-and-bucket joke as a Chuck Norris fact, that's because it was stolen.

The commenters on Gawker, who already knew all of the above, will now tell you all the fads I forgot.

Encyclopedia Dramatica:
The Wikipedia of obscure Internet memes, particularly those on the sites that follow. ED is run like Wikipedia, but its style is the opposite; most of its information is biased and opinionated, not to mention racist, homophobic and spiteful, but on the upside its snide attitude makes it spot-on about most Internet memes it covers. However net-savvy you are, ED is edgier, and it will perform 2 girls 1 cup on you to prove it.

4chan:
An English-language forum based on what is possibly the largest forum in the world, the Japanese 2channel. While 4chan's topic areas cover several aspects of Japanese culture, anime, and plenty of dirty hentai, the only board that matters is /b/.

/b/:
A subset of 4chan, technically a "random image board," where completely anonymous — no login, no username — people try to shock, entertain, and coax free porn from each other. Encyclopedia Dramatica calls it the asshole of the Internet. It's where LOLcats started as the edgier, funnier Caturdays, in which photos of cats (particularly on Saturday) were posted and captioned with forumspeak, which degenerated into the LOLspeak you now think is so clever.

Customs on /b/ include posts promising photos of personal degradation in return for certain kinds of porn or other helpful information; sarcastically asking for advice on teen romance; sarcastically asking/telling anything; pretending to have insider info or be privy to breaking news; posting image puzzles; and raiding other people's sites. Major media coverage is always full of fear and loathing, and is sometimes hilarious, as in this investigation by the Fox news reporter who played himself on Arrested Development:

/b/ has no rules; pretty much the only thing guaranteed to get a user banned is child porn, and even that gets constantly joked about. Reading /b/ will melt your brain, but sometimes you need that. It's like how I can't start a rough draft without a beer, but the analogy works better with heroin mixed with fiberglass.

Something Awful:
A comedy site on the level of Ebaum's World, Fark or College Humor. SA specializes in full-length articles about pop culture and weird web sites. The site is at its best when it mocks bizarre forum writers, such as this string of weird posts from Dogster, where users often post in character as their dogs.

YTMND
It started with this web page, a sound bite looped over an image and some floating text: "You're the man now dog!" YTMND creator Max made it after seeing Finding Forrester and pinpointing the "you're the man" line as the moment Sean Connery lost his dignity. He then made a site for other such mini-pages, which have evolved into mini-movies. The site, like any decent forum, developed a rich set of in-jokes, especially because interaction relies on creating a little mesh of several concepts. Popular in-jokes include Star Trek's Captain Picard (personal favorite: "The line must be drawn here!"), a joke about Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and the phrase "Nigga stole my bike," and a song called "Bake a Pretty Cake" from a kids' show called "Lazytown." The Lazytown character Stephanie (pictured) has inspired deep research on YTMND into ages of consent around the world. Stephanie and other fads are constantly recontextualized and mashed up with each other; for example, "Bake a Pretty Cake" works well when played over a flaming body fleeing a burning building with the words "She didn't do the cooking by the book." It's like mashups only with less of the creeping feeling that you're just listening to two crap dance songs at once. Actually, it's exactly like that.

YTMND culture is much less abusive than 4chan but less accessible than Something Awful; it's another of the early churners of fads that haven't yet popularized on Fark, Digg, and Boing Boing.

Moral: You're not old, Gabe, you just have more comprehensible sites to read.
And barely any of "the kids" are reading the sites above; most of them are glittering out their MySpaces. Right, I think that covers the most important fad factories that most people haven't heard of. If you need more sites explained so you don't have to actually visit them, or if you really want an exploration of MySpace glitter culture and a definition of "Thanks for the add," e-mail me at nick at toomuchnick dot com.

In the history of the Internet, no video has earned more views than "Star Wars Kid" — an awkward boy swinging a stick to imitate a Jedi. As of late 2006, the Viral Factory marketing company estimates it's been seen 900 million times. (The total includes an estimated 600 million e-mailed copies, millions of TV views, and over 90 million views on video sharing sites; even a skeptical reading guarantees well over 100 million views.) The most popular YouTube clip this year is Avril Lavigne's music video for "Girlfriend." It has 62 million views — under a tenth of Star Wars Kid's audience. (YouTube favorite Lonelygirl15 gets more buzz, but her most-seen episode has under two million views.) It's not just that the older video (and the all-time runner-up, "Numa Numa") had more time to catch on, but the context in which they rose has disappeared. The way we view video now has ensured that no one will ever again get as many online viewers as these two classics.

In 2003, out-of-shape high-schooler Ghyslain Raza recorded himself imitating light saber moves. Shortly after, his fellow students found and uploaded the video, and Raza became Star Wars Kid.

Why did this clip beat out so many other videos to get so popular? There are plenty of theories: Star Wars Kid captured the joy of a fan of a power fantasy, winning over the compassionate and fellow geeks and making him a simple source of mockery for everyone else. The concept was simple; it was easily (and often) parodied. But most importantly, there just wasn't much else to watch.

At this point, web video was still a new world ruled by grab-bag sites like Ebaum's World, which made money by copying images, articles and videos (often without permission), slapping on their own watermark, and showing them on an ad-filled web page. These sites resembled a Bob-Saget-free version of "America's Funniest Videos," with more emphasis on public humiliation, pranks, and video games. Viewers were mostly young males (a demographic that still dominates online video), but the enthusiasm for short-form video was spreading as the clips got more mainstream and the early viewers spread them to high school and college friends. It was inevitable that something would break out into a runaway hit and become the first online video that casual Internet users had ever seen.

But these outbreaks were flukes. Watching online video was still a fringe activity largely confined to young males. Uploading video was even rarer; it was novel that this amateur content was even available to the public. A well-informed Internet user could stay abreast of every major fad. At the time of Star Wars Kid, these were a short animation named "Badger Badger Badger" and the beginnings of a Photoshop in-joke named "Little Fatty," as well as a few long-running favorites. (I was a college freshman, sharing all the old fads as they found their way onto my school's unofficial chatroom and file-sharing forum. Every day for the first month of school, I could hear someone on the hall seeing "All Your Base" for the first time.) Star Wars Kid offered something more authentic: it gave a peek into someone's life, at that time a rare opportunity in a media world dominated by TV.

Over a year after Star Wars Kid broke out, another portly young man recorded a similarly exuberant performance, chair-dancing to a Moldovan pop song named "Dragostea Din Tei." Unlike Raza, Brolsma uploaded his performance himself to an entertainment site named Newgrounds, thus proving that reluctance wasn't a necessary factor for viral success. The video, named "Numa Numa," became a sudden hit, thanks again to the joy of peeking at someone's private nerdy exuberance. Though Brolsma didn't quite anticipate the attention and avoided the press for a few months, he was back with more videos by 2006.

This was still a pre-YouTube era, and Brolsma's video was shared through Quicktime and Windows Media files on Newgrounds and its competitors, as well as e-mail and Kazaa. Even without a one-click way to view the video, "Numa Numa" spread much quickly. In under three years, this video has earned an estimated 700 million views.

Two things kept online video from exploding: difficulty of publishing, and difficulty of viewing. Digital video, introduced in 1994, was still replacing tapes in the home camcorder market, finally putting the computer ahead of the VCR. Webcams were still evolving. And publishing to the web, or even to a file sharing network, required more computer knowledge than that of the average Internet user. Once a video was online, it was still difficult to view. Even the relative ease of accessing videos on Ebaum's World and Newgrounds required downloading plug-ins for specific video formats.

But as I explained in Slate this year, YouTube simplified the process by letting users upload any type of video with a simple web interface, then converting it to a universal format that required the already common Macromedia Flash plug-in. Now the average Internet user could create, share, and watch online video. And they did. Which should have meant a thousand new stars bigger than Star Wars Kid, right?

Hundreds of monster hits on YouTube get played over a million times. (Over 100 have topped 6 million views each.) But even the most popular video of all time, earning just over 55 million views in its 16-month existence, has no hope of touching Star Wars Kid's 900-million-view record.

Even assuming it's been viewed another hundred million times in copies on and off YouTube, "Evolution of Dance" can never catch up. Unlike its predecessors, it has competition. The interest in web videos has increased, but not nearly as much as the ease of publishing them. As of November 2006, YouTube claimed 65,000 uploads per day; thousands more videos are loaded on sites like Vimeo, Blip, and Veoh. There is an unprecedented flood of content being pushed online. Who could watch it all?

Star Wars Kid and Numa Numa had novelty. But novelty is easily reproduced. This fall alone has included viral videos like the much-parodied Soulja Boy Crank That, "Leave Britney Alone," Chuck Norris's endorsement of Mike Huckabee, a televised standup routine called "Achmed the Dead Terrorist," and a cartoon song about "Internet People." Four years ago, any one of these fads could have become the Internet's sole sensation for a whole season. Now they're just drops in a torrent.

Online video is obviously not the first medium to balloon and diversify. TV did the same thing over the last half-century. The total audience for TV grew every decade. Audiences for single shows, however, peaked in the 50s. The 2004 series finale of Friends and the 2000 finale of Survivor earned about the same audience as the 1983 finale of M*A*S*H. The viewers went from millions to more millions, but the channels went from three to hundreds, so the most-watched show still shared an audience with hundreds of concurrent shows. The competitive effect may be why only one film from the last ten years has entered the top 20 box office hits of all time (adjusted for inflation). The new Internet star faces the same effect on a vast scale, competing with the millions of videos past and present.

That isn't to say no one's getting famous. The most obvious example is Andy Samberg and his comedy group, The Lonely Island. The group posted videos on their site and at a video competition site, Channel 101. Their videos stayed pretty underground, but they got the team hired by Saturday Night Live. Lonely Island then made the immortal "Lazy Sunday" and "Dick in a Box" for SNL, then released the feature film "Hot Rod," establishing themselves as mainstream stars.

Samberg and his friends, though, weren't the average online auteurs. They went to film school; they pitched shows; they shot a rejected pilot for Fox. Since then, Hollywood has been looking for stars online, though most only make it to the B-list. YouTube user Lisa Donovan (LisaNova) won a job at MADtv. YouTuber Brooke Brodack (Brookers) signed a deal with Carson Daly. Web show Ask a Ninja earned sponsorships and sells DVDs, proving there's a living to be made online. That living is built through a long, concerted effort, not with one stunt. The same rules of competition will apply: Hope is Emo, a second project by the Ask a Ninja team, never found the same popularity.

Star Wars Kid has been off the radar for years; last year he settled a lawsuit with the students who made him famous. As for Gary Brolsma, he came back online in 2006 with an uninspired follow-up, "New Numa." Did it work? Well, for anyone else, 7 million views would be a breakout success. For the Numa Numa guy, it means fame has fizzled out. But he does do a good impression of Star Wars Kid.

Photo by amarillopollo_QUIT at Worth1000. Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. In 2000 he almost put a video on the Internet of himself dancing in his underwear. Let's all be glad he didn't.

• Pownce is insanely hot. Among the tight-knit set of Web cognoscenti, Kevin Rose's celebrity made Pownce an instant hit and Pownce invitations a scarce commodity. (Like any other scarce commodity, they ended up for sale on eBay.) This was the original impetus for my observation that "Pownce is the new pink": Like Paris Hilton, it's famous for being famous, long before anyone seriously started using it.
• Pownce is not the new Twitter. Twitter is for sending messages. Pownce is more for sending URLs, files, and invitations — things you want to share, not things you want to "share."
• Pownce is a file-sharing service at its core. You've heard of file sharing as a way to get free music, no doubt, and probably heard the convenient myth that these services are meant for sharing files with your friends. (Not that that should matter. Copyright-law novices, take note: Just because you're sharing files with your friends doesn't make republishing a copyrighted work, which is what you're doing when you upload it, any less illegal.) On Pownce, when you're sharing a file with your friends, you're really just sharing it with your friends.
• Pownce is the record industry's worst nightmare. Precisely because the sharing of files is so private and so limited, it's almost impossible to police. Unless the RIAA plans to enlist college students to sign up on Pownce and rat out their new "friends," it's hard to see how record labels will even figure out which of their copyrights are being violated — a necessary step before they can file a copyright complaint.
• Pownce isn't that interesting. It's pretty, well-designed, and functional. But is it really that hard to do any of the things you can do on Pownce?
• Pownce was not created for the reasons its founders claim. I don't buy Pownce's cover story that it was "brought to you by a bunch of geeks who were frustrated trying to send stuff from one cube to another." Pownce cofounder Leah Culver has a more convincing version: That Pownce is an excuse to program a website using some new technologies.