Excerpted from Time:

You may not realize it, but 4chan has probably touched your life. Possibly inappropriately. 4chan is unusual in several ways. It's extremely large and active; it gets 8.5 million page views a day and 3.3 million visitors a month. Since moot started it in 2003, those visitors have put up 145 million posts. By some metrics, 4chan is the fourth largest bulletin board on the Net.

4chan is also very profane. A phrase from Star Wars comes to mind: It's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Spammers don't even bother to spam 4chan; Google started searching it only six months ago. But it is the wellspring from which a lot of Internet culture, and hence popular culture, bubbles. In his way, moot is one of the most powerful people on the Web.

The Wall Street Journal's report. Note to Olds: Correct usage is "rickroll," not "Rick Roll," but rickrolling is already over. Stick to LOLcats — those will be around forever.

After appearing on the site, "LOLcats," humorous images of cats with loud text beneath them in a fake language called "LOLspeak", stormed the Web last year. (For example, instead of saying "hello," the cats would say "oh hai.") Another phrase "So I herd u like mudkips," a reference to a sea creature from the popular animated show "Pokémon," spawned thousands of tribute videos on YouTube. 4chan.org began as a simple message board with pictures and text. It was started by Christopher Poole in his Long Island bedroom in 2003 when he was 15 years old. Since then it has grown to more than 3 million monthly users, according to Mr. Poole.

One of the site's most popular memes is an online bait-and-switch known as the "Rick Roll."

For each time you did the following in the last thirty days:

1 point

• Asked for a digg
• Added someone on Facebook the day you met them
• Visited MySpace
• IMed someone asking who they are
• Messaged someone on a site like Facebook when you could have called or e-mailed
• Used a "Sent from my Blackberry/iPhone/etc." e-mail signature
• Discussed an Apple rumor
• Made a joke about fonts

2 points

• Commented on a blog just to say you liked or hated something
• Posted a Craigslist missed connection
• Used MySpace
• Submitted your own blog post to Digg
• Asked someone to blog you
• Added to a Wikipedia talk page
• Bought a Threadless T-shirt

3 points

• Told a personal story in a Yelp review
• Used Tumblr
• Gave a bad review on Amazon to a book written over thirty years ago
• Added a celebrity on Facebook
• Made a YouTube response video
• Twittered about your blog
• Got fake-married on Facebook
• Friended someone on MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, or Yahoo 360
• Asked anyone to tag anything

4 points

• Invited someone to add their photo to a Flickr group
• Invited someone to a Facebook app
• Vlogged
• Made a Facebook event that wasn't really an event
• Blogged about dealing with someone in the service industry
• E-mailed a press release
• Wrote "why do I care" in a blog comment

Death Round: 20 points

• Sent an unneeded "reply to all"
• Sold someone's contact info
• Played Second Life
• Rickrolled someone
• Reviewed your own book on Amazon
• Complained that someone reblogged a third party's content without crediting you for finding it first
• Said the word "microcelebrity"
• Invited your whole address book to something
• Talked like a LOLcat in real life

Results
0-10: Get the hell off my blog. But first digg my story.
11-15: You must feel great about yourself. Add twenty points for taking the quiz.
16-25: Very mediocre. Why are you reading this on your Playstation? Go play GTA IV.
26-40: All your Tumblr posts are stolen from other people's blogs. Your Twitters are about Twitter. But somehow all the YouTube clips you IM me are two years old.
41+: All my base are belong to you. Oh god, you probably laughed at that. You can haz the finger, jackass.

Picture: A very funny College Humor article. Before you go, I was serious about the digg.

1. Start the right kind of blog.

Your personal blog isn't good enough. Book deals for personal, story-telling blogs fizzled out a few years ago. There's just too much research for the publisher and no guarantee of mass appeal. The latest book deals look more like movie deals: A conceptual hook will draw people in even if some of the jokes fall flat. There are three kinds of blogs that recently got deals:

A. Whimsical Recognizable Aspects Of Everyday Life
Examples: Stuff White People Like, Postcards From Yo Momma
Likable, easy-to-understand blogs with a regular format. The title explains the whole concept. Make an idea you can explain in one short sentence. It's easy to market, easy to remember, easy to get blogged.
Suggestions: Ideas I Had In The Shower; Things My Kids Said

B. Unique Life Story That's Actually Many Short Stories
Example: The Secret Diary Of Steve Jobs
This is very tough, and I don't personally recommend it. You must either be a famous or extraordinary person or impersonate one. But you have to be a great writer too — there are two sites full of terrible spoof blogs.
Suggestions: Fake Obama; How I Was Actually Raised By Wolves

C. Tiny Works Of Art
Examples: Indexed, Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle, I Can Has Cheezburger
The perfect grist for a coffee-table or "tiny" book. "Indexed" is just little jokes in the form of graphs, "Cheezburger" is of course photos with captions, and "Obama" is simply random slogans about how much the presidential candidate is a cool guy, kind of like "Chuck Norris Facts" (which also got a book deal). Again, stick to one format and fully explore it. If doing the same thing over and over wasn't a path to success, you'd never hear of Jackson Pollock or Dilbert.
Suggestions:

2. Discover yourself.
After a couple of weeks, you should have enough material to start spreading your blog around. Don't just wait to get discovered, but don't overmarket yourself. Put a copy of your blog on Tumblr and LiveJournal for readers that wouldn't otherwise follow you. (Since I started reading Tumblr blogs I find myself checking other blogs less.) Start following other people on those sites, which is less crass than commenting on normal blogs and putting your URL in your signature.
If your blog catches on there, you can start submitting to bigger blogs. But you might want to have a friend do it. I have a few regular tipsters who point me to good blogs by their friends. I'm more likely to follow their leads than someone self-promoting. Still, a well-written e-mail to Gawker's tipline might get you a mention. Same goes for Boing Boing. By that point linkbloggers like Jason Kottke and Rex Sorgatz will notice you if you're worthy.
If you do self-promote and no one picks it up, start over. (If you're reading this article, you're not in it for the love.)
Meanwhile back on your blog, don't stop writing. I stupidly gave up on my blog Bad Idea A Day just when people started to notice it. Now I'm restarting and I have to earn my readership from scratch. Also, have an about page so you're ready for Step 3.

3. Ask to meet an agent.
If your idea is wildly successful but no agent has called, find Kate Lee. The agent (who doesn't have an easily googleable home page) was profiled in the New Yorker in 2004 when blog book deals were still novel. Though Gawker didn't think the trend would stick, Lee kept selling blogger books. Last year she sold blogger Rachel Sklar's Jew-ish; this week she sold Postcards From Yo Momma, written by Jessica Grose of Jezebel and Gawker alum Doree Shafrir.
Of course you could talk to other agents; White People was sold by William Morris's Erin Malone.

So did it work? If not, try again. If so, go to hell you lucky bastard. I'll be spitting at you during your reading, next to the guy from White Whine.

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.

1. Facebook stays independent and private, strikes a meaningful deal that legitimizes its business plan, and buys a startup.
2. Born out of the writers' strike, at least one "Funny or Die" style site gets big buzz and maybe even gets bought, but it fails to produce any videos near the quality of FoD or Super Deluxe.
3. Google releases some limited version of voice search beyond GOOG 411. During the year, the company's stock tops $800.
4. Digg sells to a major media company for at least $200 million, and founder Kevin Rose starts a non-web-based company.
5. YouTube announces it's adding HD video, but the feature doesn't arrive until 2009.
6. Gawker Media, publisher of this site, starts a men's site and a Web show.
7. Yahoo suffers major layoffs, leading the press to dub it the next AOL.
8. Yet AOL is spun off and reframes itself. At the end of 2008, the company's future is still uncertain.
9. Apple releases a second-generation iPhone, and at least one New York Times article tries to draw a "middle class/rich" line between those who upgrade and those who stick with the first generation.
10. A new videoblogger emerges as the go-to example for slick independent daily vlogging, following Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank.
11. Tumblr, the pared down blogging service, enjoys the popularity that 2007 brought Twitter.
12. Twitter remains independent and spins off a new service.
13. The Internet again fails to drive one presidential candidate to success. So does Chuck Norris.
14. Jason Calacanis, still running his online directory Mahalo, starts another project.
15. A new meme started in a geeky part of the web infiltrates the "normal" population even more deeply than LOLcats.
16. Yet another e-book reader comes out and no one cares.
17. Blog search engine Technorati collapses after failing to get enough funding to stay afloat.
18. The Wall Street Journal announces it will soon be free online.
19. Blog platform maker Six Apart, having spun off LiveJournal and rearranged its exec staff, gets bought.
20. Dell screws up the good will it won in 2007 with another customer-service or bad-parts scandal.
21. Net Neutrality takes another hit from a telco-friendly Congressional bill.
22. Second Life plods along.
23. The TechCrunch blog network lands a regular TV appearance, if not a show.
24. The country tires of the last round of famous-for-being-famous celebs, and gossip blogger Perez Hilton's TV show gets cancelled.
25. A minor medical incident renews the "can Apple survive without Steve Jobs" argument.

1. LOLCats
"Those ladies who work at the reception desk in your office, they might be sharing these lolcats with their friends." — David McRaney, Wall Street Journal

This:

Equals:

2. Prom Queen
"Five girls will be nominated for Prom Queen, but only one of them will win. And on Prom Night, something terrible will happen." That's the plot of the would-be successor to LonelyGirl15, the indie series that launched with very little backing under guise of nonfiction, achieving an impressive stature as the first mainstream web-based narrative series. Prom Queen, hailed by some of the stupider media outlets as a guaranteed Internet blockbuster and LonelyGirl's heir, is a stale series which makes none of its predecessor's innovations and has none of its charm.

Unfortunately, the show is representative of where "New Media" money is going. Clever ventures that fund and promote good online content are struggling to survive. VH1 canned the promising network Acceptable.TV; many online shows like Clark and Michael (starring Arrested Development actor Michael Cera) made failed bids for TV before giving up altogether.

Yep, the future of online video looks like this:

3. Twitter
Twitter messages are frequent and boring, but not as frequent and boring as articles about how Twitter messages are frequent and boring.

4. Facebook
When I was in elementary school, there was one kid who spent all of recess dribbling a basketball, every day. He'd walk around, dribbling, doing nothing else. Everyone tried to get him to play freeze tag, or "Invade the Jungle Gym," or form a gang where everyone was named after an X-Man. And he was sick of all these frigging idiots and just wanted to dribble his ball. Well no matter how many people invite me to Bite Another Zombie, or Share My Movies, or Build a Super Friend Block Party, I just want to dribble my basketball.

Facebook is also a chance for all my high school friends to remind me how boring they are. Sorry, but if even I find you boring — and I spend all day building my Netflix queue and cleaning lint off of my body — then don't try to reconnect with me after six years.

5. YouTube comments
They're pathetic. See also: Digg comments, MySpace comments, and #3.

6. The computerized pleasure palace
Thanks to the Internet, I have a list of every film I want to see (thanks, Netflix); all the music I like and should like (thanks, Last.FM) and free copies thereof (Bittorrent and Limewire); every book I want for under ten bucks (Amazon, natch); beautiful photos of my friends (Flickr); fifty ways to reach my friends (AIM, e-mail, Skype, Facebook, Pownce, Hallmark E-cards, probably some sort of telegraph-by-web); and a form to fill out for local pizza delivery (I won't tell you or you'll clog up the system). I can also order an Ikea cushion for my sore ass.

7. Mobile sites
In case I'm away from the computer, I can still Be Efficient by using mobile sites to do half of what I normally want to do, at half the speed. When I walk down the street with my iPod on and my hands wrapped around my phone, it's like I'm in a computer game and everyone else is an enemy toadstool. Last week I jumped on a homeless person.

8. Webcomics
Not everyone will get this; it's a specialized condition, like an allergy. But for those of you that have it, clicking one of these links means you'll spend ten hours of your next week reading the entire archive of a webcomic: Dinosaur Comics, Dresden Codak, Achewood, Scary Go Round, Thinkin Lincoln, Wondermark

9. Anything you can do, I can do better

Source: Wondermark

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. He's writing a sitcom about a startup.